Deriving CP-expansion in the German enclave varieties across Northeast Italy: Cracks in the bottleneck?

This paper compares and analyzes V2-related phenomena in the German-speaking varieties in North-Eastern Italy, particularly the expansion of the C-domain (violation of linear-V2) and the progressive specialization of its projections. Even though accounting for a split-CP configuration à la Rizzi (1997), we argue that CPexpansion in these German(ic) varieties differs substantially from the split-CP configuration typical of Romance languages. For this reason, the bottleneck effect fails to systematize the variation phenomena within these varieties, while the Feature- Scattering Hypothesis (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997, Hsu 2017) works better in catching intra/inter-linguistic differences. Moreover, the different degrees of expansion of the C-domain highlight two lines of variation: the West-to-East line represents the most conservative one; the North-to-South one shows a higher degree of variation. With this categorization, also supported through the analysis of the diachronic development of Cimbrian, we provide further confirmation that the geographical distribution of these varieties (i.e. the distance from the German core as well as the higher immersion in the Romance one) drastically influences the variation phenomena linked to the structural-V2 and OV/VO typology.