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Georg A. Kaiser (Universität Konstanz) & Ricardo Etxepare (Centre de recherché sur la langue et les textes basques (IKER) Bayonne / Baiona) Question formation and language contact in the Continental Basque Country This joint project deals with the formation of wh-‐questions in the continental Basque country, the Basque speaking area in France. The central aim is to describe and to analyse word order variation found in wh-‐questions in the languages and varieties spoken in this region, i. e. in French, Gascon and Northern Basque, and to investigate the possible influence of language contact in this respect. Basque is the only language in the Romance speaking area in Europe which does not belong to the Indoeuropean family, and which already existed before the arrival of the Romans. Basque is spoken today by around half a million people in the region of the Bay of Biscay, on both sides of the Pyrenees. It is an isolated language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages. Typologically, it is a language with basic subject-‐object-‐verb (SOV) order, but with a relatively free word order (Rijk 1969, Ortiz de Urbina 1995). One of the invariant aspects of Basque word order concerns the position of the wh-‐phrases in sentential structure: they must immediately precede the verb in affirmative sentences, and the negation marker in negative ones (see Etxepare & Ortiz de Urbina 2003). The fixed position of the wh-‐phrase has been traditionally attributed to obligatory movement of the wh-‐phrase to the left periphery of the clause (see Ortiz de Urbina, 1989, 1990). This fronting seems to be accompanied by the inversion of the subject and the auxiliary-‐
verb complex (Ortiz de Urbina 1995: 100): (1) (a) Nor ikusi du Jonek? who seen AUX John (b) *Nor Jonek ikusi du? who John seen AUX ‘Who has John seen?’ (2) (a) Ez dakit nor ikusi du-‐en Jonek. NEG know who seen AUX-‐COMP John (b) *Ez dakit nor Jonek ikusi du-‐en. NEG know who John seen AUX-‐COMP ‘I don’t know who John has seen.’ It is only in connection with (some) non-‐argumental wh-‐phrases, like zergatik ‘why’, or with ‘heavy’ wh-‐words that this word order restriction is less strict and that wh-‐
questions can be formed without subject-‐auxiliary inversion (see Aldai 2011 for Old Basque): 2 (3) (a) Zergatik erosi zuen Jonek liburu hau atzo? why bought AUX John book this yesterday (b) Zergatik Jonek erosi zuen liburu hau atzo? why John bought AUX book this yesterday ‘Why has John bought this book yesterday?’ Although the exact conditions for this word order variation are far from being clear and are still subject to further investigation, it is interesting to note that Spanish seems to show very similar word order restrictions in wh-‐questions (Torrego 1984, Goodall 2004). (4) (a) ¿A quién ha visto Juan? PREP who has seen John (b) *¿A quién Juan ha visto? PREP who John has seen ‘Who has John seen?’ (5) (a) No sé a quién ha visto Juan. NEG know PREP who has seen John (b) *No sé a quién Juan ha visto. NEG know PREP who John has seen ‘I don’t know who John has seen.’ (6) (a) ¿Por qué ha comprado Juan ese libro ayer? why has bought John this book yesterday (b) ¿Por qué Juan ha comprado ese libro ayer? why John has bought this book yesterday ‘Why has John bought this book yesterday?’ Given these similarities, one question which arises and which has – to the best of our knowledge – only recently been discussed (Dold 2013), is whether language contact may have played (or may still play) a crucial role here. The direction in which this possible contact induced change may have occurred is not easy to settle a priori. On the one hand, what militates in favour of an influence of Basque on Spanish is the fact that Basque has played an important role in the history of Spanish (Penny 2002) and that this kind of variation seems to be a relatively old feature of Basque (Aldai 2011). On the other hand, given that SOV languages usually show a tendency to maintain declarative word order in wh-‐questions with the wh-‐word in-‐situ (Ultan 1978, Siemund 2001, Aldai 2011), it is likely that the particular word order patterns in Basque wh-‐questions are due to influence from Spanish. If that is true, one should expect crucial differences in the Basque varieties spoken in France which are not influenced by Spanish, but rather by Gascon, a prominent variety of Occitan, and – more recently – by French which strongly differ from Spanish with respect to question formation. Concerning French, recent work has uncovered an ongoing process of language change in Northern Basque, which consists in the emergence of an in-‐situ wh-‐strategy among young speakers, of the sort one can find in French (Duguine & Irurtzun 2013). This process of change presents several intriguing aspects, such as the fact that the grammatical output of the change is mediated by the basic word order of Basque (SOV), and thus has the wh-‐phrases in positions which are at the opposite ends of the French ones. The emerging wh-‐strategy, furthermore, obeys restrictions which are identical to the French ones (intervention effects concerning negation, violation of strong islands, sensitivity to wh-‐islands, unlike ordinary wh-‐movement in Basque), but which are not 3 directly observable in the input (they concern configurations that the in-‐situ strategy in French does not allow). This suggests a substantial implication of specific grammatical modules in the shaping of the contact-‐induced change, which may cast further light in a comprehensive account of question formation. The French case can be fruitfully compared with Spanish induced language change in the dialects belonging in the other side of the Pyrenees. Spanish also has an apparent wh-‐in-‐situ strategy, in cases such as (7) (Uribe-‐Etxebarria 2002, Etxepare & Uribe-‐Etxebarria 2005): (7) ¿Ha comprado el libro QUIÉN? AUX bought the book who ‘Who is the person who bought the book?’ The in-‐situ strategy of Spanish has properties which distinguishes it from French: it does not show intervention effects, is possible with causal adjuncts, it is strongly presuppositional and requires the wh-‐phrase to be at the very right edge of the clause. Etxepare & Uribe-‐Etxebarria (2012) propose that they have a distribution analogous to a class of contrastive foci in Spanish, which must also occur at the right edge of the clause: (8) Ha comprado el vino PEDRO, y no María. AUX bought the wine Pedro, and not María ‘It is Pedro who has bought the wine, not María.’ Interestingly, the Basque varieties spoken on the Spanish side are slowly developing contrastive focus strategies which place the foci to the right, with interpretative properties which are identical to the Spanish ones (see Ortiz de Urbina, 2002, Etxepare & Uribe-‐Etxebarria 2008): (9) Liburua, uste dut erosi duela MIRENEK, eta ez Peruk. Book-‐DET think AUX bought AUX-‐COMP Miren-‐ERG and not Peru-‐ERG However, and unlike in the French situation, the corresponding in-‐situ wh-‐strategy has not been adopted for Basque by the very same speakers who can produce (9) in a natural way. It remains to be seen if some particular property of wh-‐constructions in Basque prevents the development of an in-‐situ strategy of the Spanish type. As for Gascon, which is characterized by the use of a special marker for affirmative clauses, wh-‐questions are characterized by subject verb inversion, but, as far as we know, these restrictions do not seem to be identical to the word order restrictions we find in Spanish (Rolshoven 2007, Massourre 2012). There is a possible connection between the enunciative system of Gascon and the particular properties of its wh-‐
strategy on the one hand, and some dialectally distinctive properties of wh-‐questions in Northern Basque on the other. Gascon and Basque both share the following restriction on finite forms: they cannot occur in the first position of the sentence. In Basque this restriction forces the occurrence of either negation or the lexical verb in front of the auxiliary; in Gascon, a so-‐called enonciative morpheme (que, e, be) must be attached to the finite form. Massourre (2012: 294-‐295) suggests that this is related to the clitic status of the auxiliary in Gascon. Etxepare (to appear), following insights of Ortiz de Urbina (1995), argues in favor of a similar motivation for the Basque case. Now, in Western and Central varieties of Basque, only polarity or the lexical verb can rescue the clitic auxiliary from first position. In Northern dialects on the other hand, wh-‐phrases can too: 4 (10) Nor du Jonek ikusi? (*Central, Northern) who AUX John seen ‘Who has John seen?’ The northern system is clearly reminiscent of the Gascon one, in that in Gascon, the set of elements which can rescue the clitic auxiliary from first position also includes wh-‐
phrases. Further work is necessary to determine whether this parallelism holds up under closer examination. The aim of this project is to shed light on the formation of wh-‐questions in these languages or varieties, and examine the possible effects of contact between Basque, French and Gascon. This research will be pursued by means of specific fieldwork based on dedicated questionnaires and semi-‐directed interviews of bilingual and trilingual speakers. Few truly trilingual speakers (French, Gascon, Basque) remain in the contact area between Gascon and Basque, and they are elderly people, so it is an urgent task to approach and document this waning speech community. A recent project, carried out at the research lab IKER (project Hiruele, funded by the CG64 for the years 2013-‐2014) has established a preliminary database in the form of free conversations with a number of trilingual speakers (10) and a simple closed questionnaire aiming at possible contact phenomena between Basque and Gascon. The research on bilingual and trilingual speakers will be combined with parallel research on monolingual French speakers. Perspectives: On the German side, it is planned to use the collected and analysed data for a project on word order variation in Romance interrogatives which is part of the research group ‘Questions at the interfaces’ at the University of Konstanz which will be submitted for funding through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in this summer. On the French side, the results of this research will allow the lab to widen its database on Basque-‐Occitan contact, and will be interest too a recent ERC project AthEME (2014-‐
2019), on multilingualism and language contact, led by the Leiden University Center of Linguistics, and gathering 17 European research labs, including IKER and two projects of colleagues from Konstanz, Josef Bayer and Janet Grijzenhout. As a long-‐term objective it is envisioned to apply for funding of a joint project on Basque interrogatives and language contact in the Basque Country which will compare the results gathered in the project work with diachronic data and with data from Southern Basque. References Aldai, Gontzal. 2011. Wh-‐questions and SOV languages in Hawkins' (2004) theory: Evidence from Basque. Linguistics 49, 1079-‐1135. Dold, Simon. 2013. Spanisch-‐baskischer Sprachkontakt. Eine empirische Studie zur Wortstellung in Interrogativsätzen. State exam thesis, Universität Konstanz. Duguine, Maia & Aritz Irurtzun. 2014. From obligatory WH-‐movement to optional WH-‐in-‐situ in Labourdin Basque. Language 90-‐1, e1-‐e30. Etxepare, Ricardo. 2003. Negation. In: J.I. Hualde & J. Ortiz de Urbina (eds.), A Grammar of Basque. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 516-‐564. Etxepare, Ricardo. To appear. How does adjacency arise. PF-‐conditions on Basque verb-‐focus adjacency. In: J. Fernandez-‐Vest & R. Van Valin (eds.), Cross-‐linguistic Studies in Information Structure. Berlin: Mouton. Etxepare, Ricardo & Myriam Uribe-‐Etxebarria. 2005. In-‐situ wh-‐phrases in Spanish: locality and quantification. Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 33, 9-‐34. Etxepare, Ricardo & Myriam Uribe-‐Etxebarria. 2008. On negation and focus in Spanish and Basque. In: X. Artiagoitia & J. Lakarra (eds.), Gramatika Jaietan. Patxi Goenagaren omenez. Bilbao: University of the Basque Country, 287-‐310. 5 Etxepare, Ricardo & Myriam Uribe-‐Etxebarria. 2012. Las preguntas de Qu-‐in situ en español. Un análisis derivacional. In: J.M. Brucart & Angel Gallego (eds.), El movimiento de constituyentes. Madrid: Visor, 251-‐273. Goodall, Grant. 2004. On the syntax and processing in wh-‐questions in Spanish. In: V. Chand, A. Kelleher, A.J. Rodríguez & B. Schmeiser (eds.), WCCFL 23: Proceeding from the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Press, 237-‐250. Massourre, Jean-‐Louis. 2012. Le gascon, les mots et le système. Paris: Champion. Ortiz de Urbina, Jon. 1995. Residual verb second and verb first in Basque. In: K.E. Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages. New York: Oxford University Press, 99-‐121. Ortiz de Urbina, Jon. 2002. Focus of correction and remnant movement in Basque. In: J. Lakarra & P. Goenaga (eds) Erramu Boneta. A Festschrift for Rudolf P.G. De Rijk. Donostia: Foru Aldundia-‐University of the Basque Country, 511-‐524. Penny, Ralph. 2002. A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: University Press, second edition. Rijk, Rudolf P.G. de. 1969. Is Basque a S. O. V. language? Fontes Lingvæ Vasconvm 1, 319-‐351. Rolshoven, Jürgen. 2007. Zur Syntax des Wurzelknotens. In: W. Dahmen & R. Schössler (Hg.), Sexaginta. Festschrift für Johannes Kramer. Hamburg: Buske, 339-‐352. Siemund, Peter. 2001. Interrogative constructions. In: M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher & W. Raible (Hgg.), Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien. Ein internationales Handbuch. 2. Halbband. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1010-‐1029. Torrego, Esther. 1984. On inversion in Spanish and some of its effects. Linguistic Inquiry 15, 103-‐129. Ultan, Russel. 1978. Some general characteristics of interrogative systems. In: J.H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language. Volume 4: Syntax. Standford: Stanford University Press, 211-‐248. Uribe-‐Etxebarria, Myriam. 2002. In-‐situ questions and masked movement. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2, 217-‐257.