Tracce di Nebensatzklammer nel Cimbro dei Sette Comuni: aspetti e prospettive di ricerca

The language taken into account in this paper is Cimbrian, a German variety still in use in Northeastern Italy. Although nowadays Cimbrian is regularly spoken only in the small enclave of Lusérn, in the Province of Trento, some historical texts allow us to investigate the linguistic form also of those varieties of Cimbrian, that have extinguished in the last centuries, as the variety of the Sette Comuni in the province of Vicenza. The aim of this contribution is twofold: (i) presenting some residual aspects of the so called Nebensatzklammer (i.e. the parenthesis-like distribution of the complementizer and the finite verb in subordinate sentences, as it is typical in German) both in declarative and in causal clauses in two historical sources of the Cimbrian dialect of the Sette Comuni: the so called First Catechism of 1602 and the tale Dez Dink vo’ dar Prucke (The affair of the bridge) of 1906; (ii) verifying if a change in the word order of the subordinate clauses has occurred from the first to the second text with regard to the parenthetical structure.