Linguistische Berichte Heft 210

Maltese presents a particular construction that should be classified as Mirative, although this has not been noted in Arabic linguistics. In fact, other Neo-Arabic varieties, e.g. the closely related Moroccan Arabic, do not show this category. What is present in all Arabic varieties are forms of syntactic reduplication that are grammaticalized in Maltese as miratives. This is why we need to differentiate between grammatization, i.e. giving a notional category a grammatical expression in a language, and grammaticalization, i.e. changing the (semantic) function of a form into a grammatical function. In the article, the uses of the Maltese mirative are explored in some detail and compared to another better known case, the Albanian (Ad-)Mirative. The formal resources of the Maltese mirative, the syntactic reduplication of a verbal predicate by a masdar as the reduplicand, is discussed and put in relation to its Old Arabic sources. The paper is presented as a methodological contribution, demonstrating the difficulties of exploring a “covert category” when doing field work.

The objective of this article is twofold: From a theoretical point of view its main goal is to combine a variationist approach to clause final verb clusters in 12.000 embedded Low German clauses with a generativist analysis of the structure of these clusters. From a more concrete point of view the article describes and inter-relates the different sequences of one, two, and three verbal element(s) and their complements. After analyzing the data collected in five Mennonite colonies in North and South America, three different types of speakers could be identified, their behavior suggesting that Mennonite Low German verb phrases are, contrary to modern syntactic theory, head-final and left-branching. All clusters surfacing as more parsing-friendly right-branching structures are considered to be the result of (multiple) raising and adjoining of verb phrases to the right of a head-final functional projection.

This paper deals with the syntactic development of Cimbrian, a German dialect, which was spoken for centuries in some enclaves in northern Italy. In particular, we argue that the 'dismantlement' of the V2 phenomenon is connected with a change concerning the 'nature' of specific word order patterns: from 'allowed' V2 exceptions to 'unmarked' and frequent constructions, i.e., from hanging topic (freies Thema) in WH-clause to 'new' left dislocation modalities, which finally bring to generalized V3 in the declarative clause.