Unexpected Partitive Articles in Francoprovençal*

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution seeks to add to our knowledge on ‘partitive articles’ (like the French element du in Je bois du vin, ‘I drink (some) wine’) in a highly endangered language spoken in France, Switzerland and Italy, namely Francoprovençal. Based on recent fieldwork data (2017) from the Aosta Valley and data from the ALAVAL atlas project, we will discuss outliers in a geographical and syntactic perspective, i.e. occurrences of ‘partitive articles’ where they should not appear. This either because the regions and their respective varieties do not feature them according to the existing literature or because syntactic regularities known from Standard French do not admit them (under the scope of negation and after quantifying expressions). We will try to propose some explanations for the existence of these unexpected elements, both internal and external, i.e. via language contact, and argue more generally in favour of a more systematic consideration of rare elements in fieldwork data, which should not too readily be “explained away”.