Acceso usuarios
Rolf Hotz
, Nora Julmi
Particle verbs or phrasal verbs, i.e., combinations of a preposition-like element and a verb, are common among the languages of Europe and best known from Germanic, but their systematic aspectual use in Romansh, a minority Romance language of Southeastern Switzerland, has gone largely unrecognized in the literature. Drawing on corpus and elicited data, this paper proposes an analysis of the aspectual value of particle verbs in Romansh marking telic, resultative, durative, and ingressive readings. This investigation frames the aspectual value of particle verbs as a case of syntactic convergence through intense language contact and bilingualism: although the particle verb construction in Romansh has a clear origin in Latin and some equivalent forms are found in neighboring Romance languages, its robust aspectual system in the modern language is typologically uncommon within the Romance family and strongly mirrors that of neighboring Germanic languages. These findings contribute to understanding how aspectual systems may evolve through contact and shed light on the areal dynamics underlying the emergence of particle verbs in the Alpine region.
