The syntax and prosody of post-verbal constituents in Basque

Languages vary regarding the basic word orders that they allow in a sentence – e.g., whether direct objects in them precede or follow the verb: English is a VO (Verb-Object) language and Turkish is an OV (Object-Verb) language.

OV languages typically place verbs clause-finally, but, in fact, vary widely with respect to what material, if any, is allowed after the verb, and under what conditions. Surprisingly, the post-verbal clausal domain of OV languages remains severely understudied.

I propose that the restrictions on post-verbal clausal constituents in OV languages can only be explained through the understanding of the role that prosody plays in them.

According to this prosody-centric hypothesis, the availability and types of post-verbal constituents in OV languages are regulated by their prosodic properties (e.g., accented vs. unaccented).

This approach is recent but has already produced fruitful results.I will test this hypothesis on Basque, a minority OV language of Europe, surrounded by majority VO languages, Spanish and French.

Basque is a uniquely fitting testbed for the prosody-centric approach: Basque dialects differ from each other in their prosodic properties and availability and frequency of post-verbal material.

Neither the correlation between these two facts, predicted by the prosody-centric hypothesis, nor the interconnections between the syntactic, prosodic, and information-structural properties of post-verbal material in Basque or the role of contact with VO languages in shaping them have yet been investigated.I will collect and analyze syntactic and prosodic data in Basque and compare them to those in other OV languages.

Pursuing this research is critically important for linguistic theory: without it, our understanding of basic clausal syntax, and the changes it can undergo, is woefully incomplete.

The societal impact – raising the awareness of minority language speakers’ about the workings of their native language – is also significant.