Roberta D’Alessandro

Microcontact: 5 years later

Abstract:

This talk will start out from where we left, in a presentation I held in at UiL-OTS in 2018. On the 15^th of March 2018, I presented there my ERC project Microcontact, that had just started. Back then, we were still in the preparation phase, and I presented the research questions and some preliminary considerations.

5 years later, the project is over. In this talk I’ll present the main findings regarding heritage Italo-Romance languages in the Americas, in particular regarding the generalizations that we could draw and the contribution of our research to the understanding of language change, and the predictability of change in contact.

The talk will include some case studies: null subjects and subject clitics, pronominal and demonstrative systems, auxiliaries, and differential object marking in contact. It will be shown how microcontact differs substantially from “normal” contact between language dyads, but that some predictions can be made regarding the output of language contact nevertheless.