Speaker: Gertjan Postma (Meertens Instituut)
Title: A Germanic language island in Brazil: generalized T-to-C in Brazilian Pomeranian
Time: 13:15 – 15: 00
Venue: Lipsius/235C
Abstract
Pomeranian is the coastal dialect of Continental Germanic between the Oder river and the Vistula river, an area which is called Hinter-Pommern. Until 1945 it was part of Germany, but lays in present-day Poland. While Pomeranian is not used anymore in cohesive communities in Europe since 1945, it is still in full use in various parts of Brazil. These communities derive from immigration as early as 1850, and were rather isolated until recently.
In this talk we report on new fieldwork on Brazilian Pomeranian in the state of Espirito Santo (ES). We study some morphosyntactic innovations found in these 19th century settlements. We focus on the merger of the verbal prefix tau ‘to’ (German zu), with the complementizer um ‘for’, giving rise to the complex complementizer taum.
(1) du bust nog nich grot naug um an Flasch Wiin ut-tau-drink-en (European Pomeranian)
you are yet not big enough for a bottle wine out-to-drink.gerund
‘you are not big enough to drink out a bottle of wine’
(2) Dai lüür häwa kair gild taum sich air huus ø buug-en. (Brazilian Pomeranian)
The people have no money for-to themselves a house ø build.gerund
‘The people have no money to build themselves a house’
We argue that the form taum, which used to be a preposition tau + a Dative case marker (-m), was reanalyzed in Brazilian Pomeranian as a complex complementizer um + zu (for+to), which we also encounter in Middle English (3).
(3) A modir is not bounde forto alwey and for euere ø fede her children (Middle English)
‘a mother is not bound to always and for ever feed.inf her children’
We analyze this complex complementizer as a realization of (C+T). As V remains clause final, it implies that V and T are split, similar to what happens in the history of English (split infinitives). We discuss two other instances of absence of V-to-T: daua-support, and the complete absence of suffixal past tenses in Brazilian Pomeranian: *walked. Only irregular past tenses survive.