On Monday, March 9th 2020, Ager Gondra from the University of Miami will hold a talk entitled “Crossgenerational variability in Bizkaia Basque: simplification in relative clauses”. The talk will be held in SVHUM, room B1003 and start at 14:15. Please note the unusual location and day of the week!
An abstract of the talk is provided below:
Abstract:
This study establishes the syntactic representation and derivation of relative clause (RC) constructions in the Bizkaia Basque variety. De Rijk (1988), Oyharçabal (1988) and Artiagoitia (1992) assume the Head External Analysis for Basque Relative Clauses ([DP [NP [N’ Ni …] [CP Opi [TP … ti …]]]]). However, I show that Bizkaia Basque uses the Head raising strategy to build RCs ([DP [CP DPi [C’ [TP …ti …]]]D]). Evidence for the Head raising analysis comes from idioms and scope interaction.
This study also examines syntactic variation in RC constructions among two groups of Bizkaia Basque speakers. The language of instruction the participants had in school draws the line that separates the two populations: the first population (Bizkaia Basque I) had Spanish as the language of, while the second one (Bizkaia Basque II) had Standard Basque. The results obtained from a cloze test show that differences in production between these populations depends on the grammaticality of relativization of the indirect object and adjuncts with the Head being in a subject or direct object position. For instance, sentence (1) is grammatical for the first group, while it is ungrammatical for the second group:
(1) [[ei Etorri nintzen] mutilekazi] etxie erosi dabe.
ø.soc come aux.a1s-c boy.d.soc house.d buy aux.a3se3pl
‘The boys that I came with has bought the house’
Due to the influence of Standard Basque, simplification (Silva-Corvalán 1994) occured in the status of the P of Bizkaia Basque II. This variety has the same relativization accessibility as Standard Basque, i.e. the indirect object shows restrictions and adjuncts resist relativization regardless of the position of the RC Head (Oyharçabal 2003).
