Dialectal, acquisitional, and diachronic data and investigations on subject pronouns in Gallo-Romance

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Georg A. Kaiser
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2012 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 209598594

The pronominal system of Romance languages is an extremely complex and variable morpho syntactic domain. This project deals with a subset of this system, i.e. the subject pronouns and in particular the clitic elements which mainly occur in Gallo-Romance languages in addition to strong or non-clitic pronouns. This topic has occupied generative linguists for at least thirty years now and has led to the definition of the controversial Prodrop Parameter. Our aim is to forward new insights into the function and the status of these subject clitics within the generative framework. This will be done by investigating these pronouns from three different perspectives, namely dialectology, acquisition and diachrony. The first objective is hence to collect and process data within these three domains. Secondly, the investigations will rely on major previous work by both teams in these domains on an array of Gallo-Romance languages. As a result, it is intended to compare the three sets of data and to analyse them conjointly in order to complement the existing Principles & Parameters theory. One of the hypotheses to be investigated is whether dialectal data may reflect stages which are found in the acquisitional and/or diachronic data with regard to the behaviour of subject clitic pronouns. This will be done by studying thoroughly both already collected data and additional data to be gathered in the fields where they are needed in order to verify the hypotheses. Finally, we intend to share our corpora with the scientific community on the Internet.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Michèle Oliviéri