The meandering path of VO and OV up in the Alps

In this work we investigate the structure of the vP in some German linguistic islands spoken in the North-East of Italy and try to establish a diachronic path from the more conservative OV variety to the most progressive VO one. This investigation in real time can shed new light on the debate about the factors that play a role in word order change. Plodarisch (Sappadino) is a poorly investigated variety spoken in the Northernmost part of the Veneto region, which can be shown to have preserved the so called bracket-structure (i.e. the OV basic order) in both main and embedded clauses. In this respect Plodarisch is different from Cimbrian, which is a completely VO language and from Mòcheno, where OV is a pragmatically marked possibility (see Cognola 2013). On the other hand, Plodarisch has both verb raising (VR) and verb projection raising (VPR) already discussed for Dutch and Swiss-German varieties since Haegeman&Riemsdijk (1986). All the work done on Old English and Old Romance on OV/VO alternations until now has underlined the role of Topic and Focus in changing the word order type. However, as soon as the change can be observed in real time on the basis of these dialects in contact situation, we observe that also purely syntactic phenomena like VPR, the position of enclitics (a low sequence within vP) and more generally verb raising have to be taken into account at least for the first phase of the change. This does not mean that Topic and Focus do not play a role in the change from OV to VO, but they are probably not the only factors that have contributed to “push” the VO structure. As it is often the case, syntactic change is the result of a complex constellation of factors weakening the original structure. We hope to have identified through a close examination of Plodarisch and Cimbrian one more piece of the puzzle related to the conspiracy that provoked the change of one of the most stable syntactic configurations (see Biberauer et alii (2010)).