On Criteria of Professionals of the Language about the Back-burden in Basque

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized environment where the number of trilingual people is growing in the Basque Autonomous Community, a noticeable increase of the production of expositive-argumentative texts written in Basque is taking place over the last decades. The Basque language itself is having an adaptation process pointing at improving its communicative efficiency in that kind of texts, in concurrence with powerful languages like Spanish/French and English. The order of the elements in Basque sentences, in which the phenomenon called back-burden occurs, is one of the aspects in evolution (Maia, 2014).In that environment, this article presents some results of a research about the element-order of the sentences in Euskara, in which linguistic behaviour of speakers belonging to two groups of different characteristics is analysed. The outcomes confirm, on the one hand, some tendency towards an increased back-burden in Basque sentences in both groups, and, on the other hand, are consistent with the assumption that evolution is in a less advanced stage in the case of the young university students analysed when compared with the group of experts having the highest proficiency.