The syntax of subordination in Cimbrian and the rationale behind language contact

The aim of this contribution is twofold: (i) providing a detailed description of subordination in Cimbrian and (ii) discussing the concept of language contact in terms of feature transfer. As has been recently pointed out, Cimbrian declarative and relative clauses display a unique pattern among the German dialects w.r.t. embedding. In fact, different complementizers trigger different syntax as regards the position of the finite verb. In our contribution, we extend the analysis to adverbial clauses for the first time and also investigate the double pattern of embedding in indirect WH-questions. Our data suggest that contact-induced syntactic change can be explained in terms of transfer of single abstract features.