The aspectual value of particle verbs in Romansh : Syntactic convergence through intense language contact
Hotz, Rolf (The University of Sydney)
Julmi, Nora (Leiden University)

Additional title:	The aspectual value of particle verbs in Romansh
Date:	2026
Abstract:	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.
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Romansh ; Aspect ; Aktionsart ; Particle verbs ; Phrasal verbs ; Syntactic convergence
Published in:	Isogloss, Vol. 12, Num. 1 (2026) , p. 1-25 (Articles) , ISSN 2385-4138

Adreça original: https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v12-n1-hotz-julmi
DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.629

25 p, 396.7 KB

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