To see where these ideas lead, let us consider their potential application. For concreteness, we focus on Basque/Spanish/French contact. In particular, we concentrate on two types of contact-induced change that result in parameter networks of increasing complexity. The first one corresponds to wh-movement in Basque in contact with French. The second one corresponds to the development of DOM in Basque in contact with Spanish.
5.1. Basque—French Contact Situations
The first case is represented by the development of in-situ questions in Labourdin Basque, a variety of Basque in contact with French. As shown recently by
Duguine and Irurtzun (
2014), young speakers of Basque in contact with French have developed the possibility of leaving the wh-phrase in-situ, an option that is not available otherwise in Basque, but is possible in French (
Obenauer 1994). Thus, young labourdin speakers can either leave the wh-phrase in-situ (9a, keeping the basic SOV order), or move it to the front of the sentence, triggering verb movement into the left periphery (
Ortiz de Urbina 1989). In the latter case, the syntactic distribution of the wh-phrase parallels focused constituents in Basque (9c):
(9) | a. | Nork | liburua | erosi | du ? | (In-situ) |
| | who.ERG | book.the | bought | has | |
| | “Who bought the book?” | |
| b. | Nork | erosi | du | liburua ? | |
| | who.ERG | bought | has | book.the | |
| | “Who bought the book ?” |
| c. | Jonek | erosi | du | liburua | |
| | Jon.ERG | bought | has | book.the | |
| | “It is Jon who has bought the book” |
The nature of the parameter boils down to the possibility that the wh-feature is selected by a focus feature (which triggers displacement) or not. As such, it qualifies as a subcase parameter (8b above):
(10) | a. | [FocP F [WhP Wh…] ] | (General Basque, including Labourdin) |
| b. | [WhP Wh…] ] | (Only Labourdin Basque) |
The inclusion relation that arises between (10a) and (10b) from a structural point of view is mapped into a parameter network that is more complex than (1). There is no way to formally state the difference between general Basque and Labourdin Basque in terms of a simple binary schema such as (1): Labourdin Basque includes the option available in general Basque. The kind of parameter network that we would need would be at least of the complexity level in (11b). (11a) is the previous simple schemata, reproduced here:
(11) | a. Standard Parameter Network | b. Parameter network of higher complexity |
| ![Languages 07 00034 i004]() |
(11b) displays a network that is both left- and righ-recursive, creating (potentially) multiple learning paths—to be determined by linguistic input. The starting point of the learning path is the question «Is the wh-feature selected by a focus feature ?», with the left-hand side representing, say, the “yes” answer (with its concomitant further questions), and the righthand side representing the “no” answer. Labourdin Basque includes, we argue, both options.
5.2. DOM in Contact Situations
The second contact-induced change that we would like to address within the general outlook presented here is the emergence of DOM in contact situations. The topic is vast, and we can not expect to cover all the facts here. Simplifying things somewhat, DOM consists in adding some morphological mark to the object in order to make it “different” from another local argument (local = within the same domain). Typically, this argument is the subject.
2 Crucially, DOM seems to be sensitive to a series of semantic notions (
Torrego 1998;
López 2012, and references therein), more prominently animacy:
(12) | a. | *Judas | besó | Jesús | | (Spanish) |
| | Judas | kissed | Jesus | | |
| b. | Judas | besó | a | Jesús | |
| | Judas | kissed | to | Jesus | |
| | “Judas kissed Jesus” | | |
As the reader can see, DOM resorts to a preposition (
a = to) in Spanish, which is taken to signal (differential) accusative, although it is morphologically dative. In the case of Basque, DOM involves both dative case-marking in the object and morphological indexing within the auxiliary, via agreement and a ditransitive root. This is the typical configuration that signals the presence of an indirect object. Consider (13), from
Elordieta et al.’s (
1995) description of the dialect of Lekeitio:
(13) | Nik | suri | liburua | emon | dotzut | | (Basque) |
| I.ERG | you.DAT | book.ABS | given | 3sgA.root.2sgD.1sgE |
| “I gave you the book” | | | | |
(13) is an ordinary ditransitive sentence, one that involves a verb of transfer and a dative goal. The goal is marked with the dative case suffix
–ri, and it is indexed in the auxiliary by both person agreement and the presence of a special root for ditransitive verbs. Transitive sentences in standard Basque present an Ergative–Absolutive pattern, illustrated in (14a). Until recently, this has been the general pattern for all Basque varieties. In (14a), the direct object of
ikusi (Eng. “see”) appears in the unmarked case form (absolutive). In present-day Basque, a number of varieties may present an Ergative–Dative pattern for transitive sentences (14b), particularly with 1st and 2nd person objects (example from
Elordieta et al. 1995):
(14) | a. | Nik | su | ikusi | sattut | (ERG-ABS) | (Basque) |
| | I.ERG | you.ABS | seen | 2sA.root.1sE | |
| | “I’ve seen you” | |
| b. | Nik | suri | ikusi | dotzut | (ERG-DAT) | |
| | I.ERG | you.DAT | seen | 3sgA.root.2sgD.1sgE | |
| | “I’ve seen to you” (Eng. “I’ve seen you”) | |
As the reader can check, both the case marking of the object (dative
–ri) as well as the form of the auxiliary correspond to the ones we saw in (13) for dative goals. This is what we identify (following
Mounole 2012;
Fernández and Rezac 2016;
Rodriguez-Ordoñez 2016,
2017;
Odria 2017 among others) as DOM in Basque. Crucially, the phenomenon illustrated in (14b) only arises in those dialects that are in contact with Spanish (DOM does not exist at the other side of the Pyrenean border in the dialects in contact with French). In the relevant area, the phenomenon is widespread, and it is not recent:
Mounole (
2012) locates the first attestations of DOM in the second half of the XIXth century. Basque scholars have traditionally seen this phenomenon as resulting from contact with Spanish. Besides the geolinguistic distribution of the phenomenon, limited to the Spanish side of the border, other elements argue in favour of the idea that Basque DOM depends on contact:
Austin (
2006,
2015), who notes that DOM emerges at the same time (within the first three years of age) in Basque and Spanish during the course of early (simultaneous) bilingual acquisition
3 also points out that Spanish language dominance plays a role in the frequency of the phenomenon. In the context of adult usage,
Gómez Seibane (
2012) also notes that speakers with Spanish as the dominant language use DOM more frequently.
Rodriguez-Ordoñez (
2017) points out that DOM may be triggered directly by the borrowing of Spanish verbs into Basque that allow a DOM frame. The phenomenon is highly stigmatized in formal contexts. Many Basque speakers can (and do) spontaneously alternate between DOM marking and a more traditional marking (ERG-ABS) depending on the context of use. Note that this leads us into the scenario that we schematize in (11), in which contact has as a consequence a more inclusive system that preserves options of the old one and opens up new setting paths. However, the most intriguing aspect of DOM in Basque is that the DOM system that Basque children acquire in the course of early bilingual acquisition is not symmetric for both languages (see
Rodriguez-Ordoñez 2016,
2017;
Odria 2017;
Fernández and Rezac 2016; among others). In this sense, contact-induced DOM presents a more complex parameter setting scenario, for which a left- and right-recursive parameter schema such as (11b) does not seem to be sufficient.
5.3. Some Properties of Spanish Basque
Before we go into the specifics of contact, a note is necessary concerning the relevant comparanda. The Spanish spoken in the Basque Country is known to possess a number of properties that singularizes it within the context of peninsular Spanish. Some of those properties, such as the existence of null objects where other varieties of Spanish require an accusative clitic (15a), or the presence of extended
leísmo for animate direct objects (15b), can be observed in other contact varieties of Spanish (see
Landa 1995;
Gómez Seibane 2012;
Klee and Lynch 2009).
(15) | a. | Los | perros | no | podemos | llevar | nosotros | a | la | playa | (Basque Spanish) |
the | dogs | neg | we.can | take.inf | ourselves | to | the | beach | |
“The dogs, we cannot take them to the beach ourselves” |
(from Landa 1993, p. 139) |
b. | Le | estoy | buscando | a | María, | pero | no | le | encuentro |
cl.dat | I.am | looking | for | Maria | but | neg | cl.dat | I.find |
“I am looking for Maria, but I can’t find her” |
The latter phenomenon, so-called
leísmo4, is important for our purposes as it interacts with DOM. In the Spanish of the Basque Country, the same clitic (the dative one) doubles indirect objects in ditransitive sentences (Goals) and dative case-marked objects in transitive sentences (15b above). As the reader has probably noticed, this makes the Basque-Spanish system reminiscent of Basque DOM configurations, as it involves not only a special case marking on the object, but also a specific inflectional cue in the finite form (the clitic) that embraces both transitive and ditransitive predicates. We attribute special importance to the configurations that allow clitic doubling in Basque-Spanish, as they are the ones that approach Basque DOM most closely—a point that has been stressed previously, particularly by
Rodriguez-Ordoñez (
2017).
According to
Landa (
1995), Basque Spanish DOM targets objects that are [+human, +/-masculine, +/-singular]. As the feature [+human] implies countability, and gender is not represented morphologically in the dative clitic in the Basque leista dialect, we can conclude that Basque Spanish DOM is driven by animacy. Landa notes, however, that clitic doubling in Basque Spanish introduces a further condition: it requires that the doubled argument be interpreted as “presuppositional” (
Franco 1993;
Landa 1995;
Franco and Mejias-Bikandi 1999).
Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (
1999) point at semantic contrasts such as (16a-b) and (17a-b) (from
Franco and Mejias-Bikandi 1999, p. 108) as evidence for this additional condition on doubling:
(16) | a. | Le | he | visto | a | un | marinero | (Basque Spanish) |
| | cl.dat | I.have | seen | prep | a | sailor | |
| | “I have seen one of the sailors” | |
| b. | He | visto | a | un | marinero | | |
| | I.have | seen | prep | a | sailor | | |
| | “I have seen a sailor/one of the sailors” | | |
(17) | a. | A | quién | le | han | Seleccionado ? | (Basque Spanish) |
| | prep | who | cl.dat | they.have | selected | | |
| | “Who among them did they select ?” | | |
| b. | A | quién | han | seleccionado ? | | |
| | prep | who | they.have | selected | | | |
| | “Who did they select/who among them did they select?” | | |
Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (
1999) observe that whereas non-doubled indefinites can have either a specific or a non-specific reading (see also
Leonetti 2012), clitic doubled indefinites can only have a specific one. This reading, they argue, corresponds to the insertion of the variable introduced by the indefinite in the restriction of the event quantification, along the lines of
Diesing’s (
1992)
Mapping Hypothesis. The clitic forces this reading by setting the scope position of the indefinite outside the vP, a position that maps into the restriction of the event quantification. The non-doubled indefinite on the other hand, can be mapped inside the vP or undergo covert raising, in which case it will end up in the same position of the clitic. Doubling thus has a semantic effect in the Spanish of the Basque Country.
Basque Spanish DOM, coupled with clitic doubling, spans across a variety of non-definite objects, as long as they are human and can be interpreted specifically. The range of DOM in the Spanish of the Basque Country is thus relatively large and includes other types of indefinites besides the ones we have seen. For instance, the dative clitic can double cardinal quantifiers, as long as they are interpreted partitively. I reproduce here data from
Paasch-Kaiser (
2015), recorded in her monograph about the Spanish of Getxo, a biscayan town (
Paasch-Kaiser 2015: 344):
(18) | Les | cogieron | a | todos | y | venga, | todos | a | la | carcel. |
| cl.dat.pl | they.caught | prep all | and | come.on, | all | to | the | jail |
| Y | les | fusilaron | a | un montón | (Getxo Spanish) | | | |
| And | cl.dat.pl | they.shot | prep a | lot | | | | | |
| “They caught all of them, and come on, everyone to jail. |
| And then they shot a lot (of them)” |
The data gathered in Getxo also include one instance of doubling with a generically interpreted indefinite (
Paasch-Kaiser 2015: 343). We take generic indefinites to be mapped into the restriction of event quantification.
(19) | Hay | gente | que no | le | entiende | a | un bermeano | (Getxo Spanish) |
| there.is | people | that neg | cl.dat.sg | understands to | a | bermean | |
| ‘There’s people that cannot understand a typical speaker from Bermeo’ | |
NPIs, as far as they are animate can also occur in a DOM frame with clitic doubling. In that case, they are interpreted as partitive:
(20) | No | le | he | visto | a | nadie | (Basque Spanish) |
| neg | cl | I.have | seen | prep | anyone | |
| “I didn’t see anyone (of them)” | |
5.4. Back to DOM
The reason we go into so much detail about the Basque Spanish system is because, once the main lines of the Basque Spanish DOM are singled out, it turns out that it is significantly different from the Basque DOM system for which it has presumably served as a triggering or motivating factor. None of the specific indefinites that require DOM and clitic doubling in the Spanish of the Basque Country have DOM counterparts in Basque:
5(21) | a. | *Arrantzale | bati | ikusi | diot. | (Basque) |
| | fisherman | one.dat | seen | aux | |
| | “I have seen one (of the) fishermen” | |
| b. | *Pilo | bati | fusilatu | zioten. | |
| | lot | one.dat | shot.past | aux | |
| | “They shot a lot of them” | |
| c. | *Ez | diot | inori | ikusi | |
| | neg | aux | anyone.dat | seen | |
| | “I haven’t seen anyone” | |
(22) provides a comparison of the DOM system in the Spanish of the Basque Country and in Basque, based on the mentioned literature.
6(22) | DOM in Basque and the Spanish of the Basque Country |
| Spanish | Basque |
1/2 person | OK | OK |
Human Definite | OK | %OK |
Human Specific | OK | * |
Human non-specific | OK | * |
Non-Human specific | OK | * |
The basic difference between the Basque system and the Spanish one can be defined broadly in terms of Aissen’s typology of One-Dimensional DOM versus Two-Dimensional DOM. In her comparative study of DOM,
Aissen (
2003) distinguishes languages in which a single semantic or deictic factor (say specificity or animacy) is relevant to the differential marking of the object (e.g., Turkish or Yiddish) and languages in which both are (like Spanish, Hindi or Persian). Basque DOM seems to be organized around the animacy scale. Spanish, including the Spanish of the Basque Country, is organized on the basis of two jointly operating scales: animacy and specificity.
Languages seem to restrict DOM to varying subsets of the feature combinations expressed in (22) (see
Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011). From this point of view, there is nothing particularly noteworthy in the Basque cases, beyond what is due to account for this variation cross-linguistically. However, contact situations, particularly early bilingual acquisition, have the potential to underline specific inductive problems that L1 acquisition does not have to address. Why is it that the effects of contact stop at that precise point? Why is it not the case that contact-induced change goes all the way in Basque to mimic the Spanish system?
Odria (
2017) proposes that what unites the different instances of DOM in Basque (definite third person objects and first and second person pronominals) is the presence of D in the object, which encompasses both definites and person pronominals (see also
Artiagoitia 2012). We adopt this view, but with a twist. We propose that what underlies Basque DOM is clitic climbing. It has been observed that person agreement in Basque seems to behave as a clitic (
Etxepare 2003;
Arregi and Nevins 2012). It is relevant, at this point, to consider Long Distance Agreement cases, which we do in the next subsection.
5.5. Long Distance Agreement in Basque
In his work on Long Distance Agreement in Basque,
Etxepare (
2003,
2006,
2012) shows that LDA in person, unlike LDA in number, is restricted to restructuring contexts, those that in other languages constrain the domain of clitic climbing. LDA in Basque arises with two types of nominalized dependents, that we will call P-dependents and D-dependents. Under certain selecting predicates (typically modal, motion, and aspectual predicates as well as predicates expressing force-dynamic relations, in the sense of
Talmy 2000), both person and number LDA are possible. The nominalized dependents that allow this are those that are headed by an aspectual postposition (P-dependents). Both person and number LDA are possible for instance with a control predicate like
saiatu (Eng. “try”), a member of the set of lexical restructuring predicates cross-linguistically (
Etxepare 2006, p. 304 for Basque;
Wurmbrandt 2001) that in Basque selects a P-dependent:
(23) | a. | Saiatuko gara [PostP [NomP | _ zu | jendartean | aurkitze]]-n] |
| | try.prosp we.are | you.abs among.the.people find.nom.post |
| | “We will try to find you among the people” |
| b. | Saiatuko zaitugu [PostP [NomP | _ jendartean | aurkitze]]-n]. | (Basque) |
| | try.prosp we.are.you | among.the.people find.nom.post | |
| | “We will try to find you among the people” | |
(23a) represents an ordinary control configuration with the verb saiatu «try», an intransitive verb that selects a nominalized clause with a postpositional head and only agrees with its single argument (the subject). (23b) represents an LDA structure, in which the matrix auxiliary shows agreement both with the subject and with the second person object in the embedded sentence.
Person LDA is not possible outside the domain of prototypical restructuring predicates. Predicates that do not typically inform the category of restructuring verbs can also allow LDA in Basque. Those verbs select nominalized complements that are headed by the determiner
–a (D-dependents), and they can include an overt subject.
7 They seem to be structurally more complex (see
Goenaga 1984;
Artiagoitia 1994;
San Martin 2004;
Etxepare 2006). A verb such as
gustatu (Eng. “like”) is a case in point. The verb
gustatu (Eng. “like”) in Basque allows LDA in number but not LDA in person. Consider (24a-b):
(24) | a. | Joni [DetP [NomP | liburu erromantikoak | irakurtzea]]-a] | gustatzen | zaio |
| | Jon.dat | book romantic.pl | read.nom.det | like.imp | Present.3sA-3sD |
| | ‘Jon likes to read romantic books’ |
| b. | Joni [DetP [NomP | liburu erromantikoak | irakurtzea]]-a] | gustatzen | zaizkio |
| | Jon.dat | book romantic.pl | read.nom.det | like.imp | Present.3plA-3sD |
| | ‘Jon likes to read romantic books’ |
In (24a) the auxiliary shows default 3rd person singular agreement, the index that corresponds to a nominalized clause headed by a Determiner. In (24b), the auxiliary shows plural agreement, which can only come from the embedded object,
romantic books. This is a case of number LDA. In the same configuration, person LDA is not available:
(25) | a. | Joni [DetP [NomP | zu | inguruan | ikuste]]-a] | gustatzen | zaio. |
| | Jon.dat | you | around | see.nom.det | like.imp | Present.3sA-3sD |
| | “Jon likes to see you around” |
| b. | *Joni [DetP [NomP | inguruan | ikuste]]-a] | gustatzen | zatzaizkio. |
| | Jon.dat | around | see | like.imp | Present.2s-3sD |
| | Jon likes to read romantic books” |
In other words, only in those contexts that correspond cross-linguistically to restructuring contexts is person LDA allowed in Basque.
(Absolutive) person agreement is manifested by affixes that look like the reduced forms of the corresponding full pronominals. Consider the following table, from
Berro and Etxepare (
2017):
(26) | Person agreement markers in Standard Basque: |
| ABS | ERG | DAT | ALLO |
1 SG | n- | -t / -da- | |
2 SG MASC/FEM COLL | h- | -k / -n -a- / -na- |
3 SG | | -o- | |
1 PL | g- | gu | |
2 SG NON-COLL | z- | zu | |
2 PL | z- | zu | |
3 PL | | | | |
The absolutive agreement markers in the table are reduced forms of the pronominal series. Thus, the agreement affix
n-, for 1st person singular absolutive is a reduced form of the pronoun
ni (Eng. “I”). The 2nd person singular agreement affixes for the colloquial and unmarked registers are
h- and
–z, which correspond to their pronominal counterparts
hi and
zu (Eng. “you”). First-person plural
g- corresponds to the pronoun
gu (Eng. “we”). There is no such relation in the (separate) paradigm of number agreement, which is completely unrelated to the pronominal system (see
Berro and Etxepare 2017).
The table in (26) shows that 3rd person singular in Basque does not have any independent exponent. Basque third-person pronominals are null, and they have no corresponding affix marking in the auxiliary. Only their plural counterparts have, in the separate number agreement paradigm. We predict that LDA in person, which we take to result from clitic climbing, will fail precisely for the third person singular, as there seems to be no reduced pronominal corresponding to that cell. This prediction is borne out. There is no counterpart of (23b) with third-person singular LDA. The resulting sentence would be (27), which is ungrammatical:
(27) | *Saiatuko | dugu [PostP [NomP | jendartean | aurkitze]]-n] | (Basque) |
| try.prosp | we.are.him/her | among.the.people | find.nom.post |
| ‘We will try to find him/her among the people’ | |
The auxiliary in (27) is, like the auxiliary in (23b), a transitive auxiliary, one that is required when an object is present in the vP. However, the form does not license LDA. This syntactic gap goes hand-in-hand with the absence of pronominal morphology in the auxiliary.
Etxepare (
2012) argues that this provides evidence for the idea that person agreement morphology is derived via clitic climbing from argument positions.
There is only one place in table (26) where the combination of the third person and singular is expressed by an overt exponent, and this is the dative slot. Furthermore, it has been plausibly claimed (by
Gomez and Sainz 1995) that the exponent
–o is actually a cognate of the proximate determiner
–o. In present-day Basque the determiner
–o includes the speaker within the denotatum of the article, as in (28):
(28) | Lagun-o-n | ospakizun-a | (Basque) |
| friend-det-genitive | celebration-det | |
| ‘The celebration of us friends’ | |
Following the logic of the discussion, we may ask whether the Basque dative agreement affix
–o behaves on a par with person agreement morphology, namely as a clitic. Note that if that were the case, we could circumscribe DOM in Basque to those cases in which clitic climbing is possible. Can we show that dative agreement is an instance of clitic climbing in Basque? What we need to examine is whether LDA with datives behaves on a par with Person LDA or not. That is, whether it is possible only in restructuring contexts.
Etxepare (
2003) already showed that dative 3rd person LDA is possible in restructuring contexts, so we can find pairs such as (29a,b), parallel to (23a,b) (from
Etxepare 2003, p. 173):
(29) | a. | Saiatuko | gara | [ zuri | hori | ematen] | (Basque) |
| | try.prosp | Present.1sA | you.dat | that.abs | give.imp | |
| | ‘We will try to give you that’ | |
| b. | Saiatuko | dizugu | [ zuri | hori | ematen] | |
| | try.prosp | Present.2sD.1sE | you.dat | that.abs | give.imp | |
| | We will try to give you that’ | |
In (29a), the verb
saiatu (Eng. “try”) behaves as an intransitive verb, agreeing with its subject in person and number (1st person singular). In (29b) the auxiliary includes an agreement index for the embedded indirect object
zuri (Eng. “to you”), besides the agreement index for the subject of
try. The presence of the two agreement indexes in the verbal form forces the choice of a ditransitive auxiliary root. As we showed for person agreement indexes, LDA is not possible with 3rd person datives outside bona fide restructuring contexts. We cannot use the verb
gustatu (Eng. “like”) to check this, as the verb
like in Basque includes already a dative agreement index for its subject. We will use another non-restructuring predicate,
aztertu (Eng. “examine, ponder”) to show that the restrictions on dative 3rd person singular agreement are those of person agreement. Consider in this regard the following contrast:
(30) | a. | [DP zu | salatzea ] | aztertu | dute. | (Basque) |
| | you.abs | accuse.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.3sA.3plE |
| | ‘They considered accusing you’ | |
| b. | *[DP zu | salatzea ] | aztertu | zaituzte. | |
| | you.abs | accuse.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.2sA.3plE |
| | ‘They considered accusing you’ | |
(30a) involves a nominalized dependent headed by the determiner
–a (a D-dependent). In this configuration, LDA in person is not possible. LDA in number, unlike LDA in person, is available:
(31) | [DP Liburu batzuk | saltzea] | aztertu | dituzte. | (Basque) |
| book some.abs | sell.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.3plA.3plE |
| ‘They considered selling some books’ |
Dative LDA (both in 3rd person sing and 3rd person pl) behaves as person agreement. It is not possible out of a D-dependent (32b-c):
(32) | a. | [Legeari | obeditzea] | aztertu | dute. |
| | law.det.dat | obey.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.3sA-3plE |
| | ‘They considered obeying the law’ |
| b. | *[Legeari | obeditzea] | aztertu | diote. |
| | law.det.dat | obey.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.3sD-3plE |
| | ‘They considered obeying the law’ |
| c. | *[Legeei | obeditzea] | aztertu | diete |
| | law.det.pl.dat | obey.nom.det | consider.partc | Present.3plD-3plE |
| | ‘They considered obeying the law’ |