Progressive and prospective aspect in a German dialect in Italy

Isolated German-based dialects have been reported to have developed a wider use of aspectual periphrases than the dialects within the German-speaking countries; in some cases, they have extended the functional domains of periphrases that are also found in German dialects while, in others, they have developed their own periphrases, possibly by borrowing constructions that can also be found in the surrounding contact varieties. In the first part of our contribution, we present new data that were collected in a large study concerning progressive and prospective periphrasis in a German-based variety that is spoken in Italy, and compare its aspectual system of progressivity to that in the contact Romance dialects. In the second part, we enter into a theoretical debate regarding the formal model of the syntax of progressives. In the cartographic approach, PROGR is a universal functional head in a monophrasal structure. The alternative that we aim to discuss here is that the meaning of the progressive is composed of its component parts, which are crucially biclausal structures, with the embedded sentence being introduced via locative periphrasis in part-whole semantics. We argue that only a constructivist perspective can yield the required insights into microvariation, contact, and change.