Il ruolo del contatto tra varietà tedesche e romanze nella costruzione «verbo più locativo»

In this article we examine some effects of language contact in the multilingual province of Trento, where Romance and Germanic varieties have been in contact for centuries. We focus on the syntax of phrasal verbs (e. g. ‘go out’, ‘get away’) in Trentin, a Romance dialect group, in Fassan, a Rhaeto-romance variety, and in Cimbrian, a German(ic) minority language. In particular, we deal with two word order phenomena which might be attributed to contact with the more prestigious or widespread varieties spoken in the area: (i) in some Fassan phrasal verbs we find the order «Verb – XP – Locative element», which resembles the German order; (ii) in Cimbrian various syntactic positions are possible; one of them corresponding to the one used in Trentino dialects and Regional Italian. Despite these resemblances, we show that the «unexpected» word orders found in the two varieties are not syntactic «borrowings» from the close German (for Fassan) and Romance (for Cimbrian) varieties; rather, they are the results of internal changes, which may have been reinforced by contact with other languages.