Lecture: The word order of complement clauses in Wangerooge Frisian

Wangerooge Frisian is a dialect of Frisian which went extinct in the early 20th century. Although it is relatively well documented and some linguistic studies have appeared, there is as yet no comprehensive grammatical description of the dialect.

In my presentation, I will first give a brief introduction to Wangerooge Frisian and the linguistic sources. I then present the results of a study of complement clauses in the dialect. As in many Germanic languages, the finite verb in Wangerooge Frisian may appear in different positions in complement and other subordinate clauses. In some cases it is in the second position (“V2”), as in dat yu sil de aúven heit máckii ‘that she must heat the oven’; in other cases it appears later in the clause (“V-late”), as in dat iik dait nich doo weil ‘that I will not do that’ (lit.: ‘that I that not do will’).

A pilot study indicates that the V2 pattern is especially frequent in reported utterances, e.g. after verbs like quidder ‘say’ and fartääl ‘tell’. However, this cannot be the whole story, as examples of V2 are also found in other contexts. In my presentation I will consider other relevant factors determining the position of the finite verb and discuss how Wangerooge Frisian fits into existing typologies of complement clause word order.

Info

Day: 2022-11-04
Start time: 11:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 3035
Track: Corpus Linguistics
Language: en

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