The syntax and prosody of post-verbal constituents in Basque

ended

Languages vary regarding the basic word orders that they allow in a sentence – e.g., whether direct objects in them precede or follow the verb: English is a VO (Verb-Object) language and Turkish is an OV (Object-Verb) language. OV languages typically place verbs clause-finally, but, in fact, vary widely with respect to what material, if any, is allowed after the verb, and under what conditions. Surprisingly, the post-verbal clausal domain of OV languages remains severely understudied. I propose that the restrictions on post-verbal clausal constituents in OV languages can only be explained through the understanding of the role that prosody plays in them. According to this prosody-centric hypothesis, the availability and types of post-verbal constituents in OV languages are regulated by their prosodic properties (e.g., accented vs. unaccented). This approach is recent but has already produced fruitful results. I will test this hypothesis on Basque, a minority OV language of Europe, surrounded by majority VO languages, Spanish and French. Basque is a uniquely fitting testbed for the prosody-centric approach: Basque dialects differ from each other in their prosodic properties and availability and frequency of post-verbal material. Neither the correlation between these two facts, predicted by the prosody-centric hypothesis, nor the interconnections between the syntactic, prosodic, and information-structural properties of post-verbal material in Basque or the role of contact with VO languages in shaping them have yet been investigated. I will collect and analyze syntactic and prosodic data in Basque and compare them to those in other OV languages. Pursuing this research is critically important for linguistic theory: without it, our understanding of basic clausal syntax, and the changes it can undergo, is woefully incomplete. The societal impact – raising the awareness of minority language speakers’ about the workings of their native language – is also significant.