Progressive aspect in a Dutch-German- contact

Nantke Pecht (University of ) Keywords: progressive aspect, syntax, semantics, language-dialect contact, Germanic contact variety

This talk presents a first analysis of progressive aspect in Cité Duits, a contact variety composed of features of Belgian Dutch, German and a Limburgish dialect. Cité Duits (lit. ‘mining district German’) developed among the locally-born children of immigrant miners of different European language backgrounds in the shared housing district of Eisden (B) in the 1930s. Nowadays, it is on the cusp of disappearing, with approximately ten speakers left, all of them men in their eighties. My contribution will be based on a corpus of audio data of spontaneous- like interactions (340 minutes) gathered by a method of sociolinguistic fieldwork (Labov 1972) in 2012/13 and 2015/16. By following the views postulated by Comrie (1976), Bybee and Dahl (1989) and Bybee et al. (1994), I consider aspect as a cross-linguistic category that exhibits a number of different realization strategies. An example from the data is the following:

(1) (0313_152448: 84.31 - 88.01)

de war(t) teleVIsie an gucke, he was television PROG lookINF

flog ihm au(ch) de (au)AUge kaputt. flyPST him also the eye broken

‘He was watching television when his eye got hurt.’

In (1), the speaker reports a situation in the past where two events took place simultaneously. He first uses a progressive construction (war(t) + an + V-INF), indicating that the situation he referred to continued, and then switches to the simple past tense (flog). Progressive aspect is expressed here by means of an plus V-INF plus sein-FINITE ‘at V-INF be-FINITE’. The investigation of progressive constructions is particularly intriguing because the linguistic means in Cité Duits’ contact varieties differ to some extent but also overlap. Neither Belgian Dutch, Limburgish nor German have a single progressive construction. Although there are several ways to denote progressivity, they lack a ‘standard’ progressive marker. Besides, explicit marking of progressive aspect is optional in many contexts (Behrens, Flecken, and Carroll 2013: 95; Broekhuis, Corver, and Vos 2015: 150; Ebert 1996; Krause 2002; Tomas 2018: 53; Witt 2015: 5; Anthonissen, de Wit, and Mortelmans 2016: 9; van Pottelberge 2004). Nevertheless, it has been argued that Dutch has grammatical means to indicate progressive aspect, whereas German is said to have no grammaticalized aspectual markers (Flecken 2011: 62). Keeping these observations in mind, the question arises if and how progressive aspect is marked in Cité Duits. In the first part of my talk, I will examine whether there is a progressive construction typical to Cité Duits. Based on frequency of occurrence, I will demonstrate that Cité Duits has one construction that is clearly the most widespread way to convey progressive meaning. In the second part of my talk, I will address the question of whether there are particular syntactic or semantic restrictions in the respective constructions that express ongoingness. Ultimately, I will discuss how these findings can be interpreted in terms of language contact.

Acknowledgments This project is financed by the Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, project number 322-70-008).

References

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