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Should it move or should it stay? How speakers of two Basque dialects organize meaningful elements in transitive clauses

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Author

  • Anne Goergens

Summary, in English

This thesis investigates word order patterns in spoken Basque for two dialects, Navarrese-Lapurdian and Gipuzkoan. The data for the analysis was elicited with stimuli pictures in an experiment in dialogue form. The 26 participants were from Hazparne (Lapurdi), Donostia, and Andoain (both Gipuzkoa). The data consists of transitive main clauses, both questions and declaratives with nominal subject and object, some uttered in a neutral context, others with a focused subject, and others with a focused object. Every sentence contained 2-4 verbal elements (lexical verb, inflectional auxiliary, ari, saiatu/entseatu). The data confirmed previous findings: the basic word order of Basque is A O V. The focused NP or WH-word has to be left-adjacent to the verb but this rule can be broken in Navarrese-Lapurdian, where the constituents can also occur in situ. It was also confirmed that Navarrese-Lapurdian speakers use a marked focus, in which the focused NP or WH-word is followed by the auxiliary only. Surprisingly, this pattern was also found for the speakers from Andoain. Moreover, it was found that the variety of orders in which verbal elements can follow the focused NP or WH-word is bigger than assumed. These orders underlie a common pattern: the auxiliary moves to the left of the focused NP or WH-word and can pied-pipe other verbal elements, beginning with the one deepest embedded in the structure of the verb phrase. Pied-piping was found to be optional for the speakers from Hazparne and Andoain but obligatory for the speakers from Donostia. Furthermore, the data indicates in which way the change from obligatory adjacency of focus/WH-word and verb to in situ is about to happen in the Hazparnian dialect. It also shows that both dialects try to be as economical as possible in trying to avoid movements from the underlying word order A O V, where possible. Furthermore it shows that the two dialects are complex in a different way: while the obligatory adjacency of focused NP/WH-word in Gipuzkoan forces certain movements, the Navarrese-Lapurdian dialect is complex as two structures exist parallel to each other.

Department/s

  • Master's Programme: Language and Linguistics

Publishing year

2015

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Master's degree (two years)

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Keywords

  • free word order
  • Basque
  • Navarrese-Lapurdian
  • Gipuzkoan
  • focus
  • information structure
  • structural priming
  • economy
  • Galdegaia
  • in situ
  • pied-piping
  • markedness
  • complexity
  • syntactic movement

Supervisor

  • Arthur Holmer (docent)
  • Anastasia Karlsson (researcher)