The syntax and prosody of post-verbal constituents in Basque

Project Information

SP-PVCB

Grant agreement ID: 101109402

DOI

10.3030/101109402

Project terminated on 31 August 2024

EC signature date 17 April 2023

Start date 15 June 2023

End date 14 June 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 181 152,96

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAIS VASCO/ EUSKAL HERRIKO UNIBERTSITATEA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SP-PVCB (The syntax and prosody of post-verbal constituents in Basque)

Reporting period: 2023-06-15 to 2025-06-14

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Languages vary regarding the basic orders of words that they allow in a neutral, out-of-the-blue sentence. For instance, in English or Russian direct objects typically follow the verb, which makes English and Russian Verb-Object, or VO, languages; in contrast, in Turkish or Japanese direct objects precede the verb, which makes them Object-Verb, or OV, languages. In OV languages, the verb is usually the very last element in the clause, but, under a closer look, some of them allow certain material to follow the verb, under certain conditions. The post-verbal clausal domain of OV languages remains severely understudied, which is surprising, given that a better understanding of the rules that apply to the post-verbal domain can give us indispensable clues for understanding other linguistic processes, such as OV languages turning into VO languages over time.

I propose that the restrictions on post-verbal clausal constituents in OV languages can only be explained through the understanding of the role that prosody, or intonation, plays in them. According to this idea, the availability and types of post-verbal constituents in OV languages are regulated by their prosodic properties (e.g. accented vs. unaccented). This approach is recent but has already produced fruitful results.

The objective of this project has been to test this hypothesis on Basque, a minority OV language of Europe, surrounded by majority VO languages, Spanish and French. Basque is a uniquely fitting testbed for the prosody-centric approach: Basque dialects differ from each other in their prosodic properties and availability and frequency of post-verbal material. Neither the correlation between these two facts, predicted by the prosody-centric hypothesis, nor the interconnections between the syntactic, prosodic, and information-structural properties of post-verbal material in Basque or the role of contact with VO languages in shaping them have yet been investigated.

The project centers around collecting and analyzing syntactic and prosodic data from a variety of Basque dialects and comparing them to those from other OV languages. Pursuing this research is of vital importance for linguistic theory: without it, our understanding of basic clausal syntax, and the changes it can undergo, would be incomplete.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As part of the project, I developed a questionnaire for collecting a detailed and well-controlled dataset of utterances containing post-verbal constituents in Basque, consisting of ca. 400 test sentences, and gathered data from Basque speakers with the help of this questionnaire.

While the details of the analysis are still to be worked out (due to the early termination of the project), it is becoming clear that the importance of the role of prosody varies between Basque dialects. Specifically, the influence of prosody on word order seems to be greater in dialects that feature a system of lexical pitch accents than in dialects that do not -- though some dialects present an exception to this generalization.

The results achieved to date have been communicated in five presentations at major international conferences and four peer-reviewed publications.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The results of the project achieved to date indicate that prosodic factors play a key role in the shaping of certain syntactic properties in OV languages -- though the importance of this factor in understanding language change is often overlooked. Further work in this domain, in Basque and beyond, should, by default, take prosodic factors into consideration -- unless there is a good reason for not doing so, e.g. unavailability of prosodic data for extinct language varieties.

Prosody of utterance with postverbal constituents in Bizkaian Basque