Phrasal Verbs Micro-variation in an Alpine Area of North-eastern Italy

This paper focuses on the variation in the production of phrasal verbs across the Romance dialects spoken in Trentino and two Germanic languages of the same province (Cimbrian and Mòcheno). In this area, as it is briefly illustrated in §1, the use of simple verbs followed by a locative particle serves to reinforce directional meanings with intransitive motion verbs, transitive motion verbs, and aspectual nuances with some action verbs. Linguistic atlases, dialectal dictionaries, and recent studies document the frequency of this construction. However, data collected from AlpiLinK, a recent crowdsourcing-based survey, presented in §2, reveal a heterogeneous picture, where phrasal verbs frequently alternate with simple or prefixed verbs. Sections §2.1 and §2.2 explore the extent of this variation, in Romance and German varieties respectively, and focus on diachronic differences. The comparison conducted in §3 between the variation registered in the Romance dialects of the province reveals a pattern of diachronic change in the linguistic evolution of the phenomenon under study, due to the influence of Italian above all for the youngest speakers. The vitality of phrasal verbs appears rather stable among younger Cimbrian and Mòcheno speakers, who only in few cases prefer the simple verb. However, the limited amount of data collected in German-speaking minority areas for speakers aged 25 or younger does not allow the results to be considered fully robust. Differently, the total amount of data for Romance and Germanic in the in the entire northern part of Italy under investigation in AlpiLinK is sufficient for conducting geostatistical analyses and generating ordinary-kriging prediction maps (§3.3).