Chapter 10 Auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance heritage languages: Argentina and the UK

Abstract

Auxiliary selection (AS) is the topic of this paper, which describes the phenomenon in two different Italo-Romance varieties used as heritage languages in two migratory settings: the Piedmontese dialect in the regions of Cordoba and Santa Fé (Argentina) and the Campanian dialect of Montefalcione (Campania, AV, South of Italy) in the English city of Bedford. Both dialects have split intransitivity and alternate between the use of HAVE and BE as past-tense auxiliaries. In both cases, the Italo-Romance varieties are in contact with a language without AS: Spanish and English in fact select only HAVE. The expected outcome of language contact in these scenarios, informed by a vast literature on language contact, would be that the heritage languages tend to generalize HAVE over BE as a past-tense auxiliary, due to the exposure to a dominant language (Spanish/English) which selects only HAVE. The data show relevant differences in the two migratory settings. In Argentinian Piedmontese, HAVE is extended to unaccusatives, while in Montefalcionese spoken in Bedford, UK, BE is extended to unergative and transitive verbs. In the first case, the pattern is interpreted as contact-induced change, as the HL is developing a type of auxiliation that is closer to the dominant language; but in the latter case, we hypothesised that the divergent patterns observed in heritage Montefalcionese reflect a process of dialect mixing and levelling occurring in the community. The comparative approach makes it possible to better understand the mechanisms of variation and change from a sociolinguistic point of view and highlights the importance of external variables which impact on the linguistic behaviour of migrants.