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Aspects of Language Variation and Change in Contemporary Basque by William F. Haddican A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics New York University September, 2005 ___________________ John Victor Singler, Advisor ' William F. Haddican All rights reserved, 2005 To Julie and Evan ii i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the following people for their help with this project. The people of Oiartzun, whose encouragement, help and hospitality during this fieldwork portion of this project I am deeply grateful for. My dissertation advisor, John Singler, whose insight, critical readings and good teaching I have benefited from enormously. As an advisor, John has been tremendously supportive, and at the same time very demanding. I am indebted to him not only for his moral and intellectual contribution to this project, but also for patiently showing me the ropes of professional Linguistics over the last six years. Richard Kayne, who was the faculty member with whom I worked most closely on the syntax portion of this dissertation. I am grateful to him for his encouragement and insight and also for modeling how to approach problems in Linguistics taking nothing for granted. The three other members of my dissertation committee(cid:151)Gregory, Guy, RenØe Blake and Bambi Schieffelin(cid:151)and an external reader(cid:151)Ricardo Etxepare(cid:151)for valuable help and suggestions on the material presented here. The four extremely diligent and talented interviewers who helped me in the data-collection portion of this project: Maider Lekuona, Jabi Elizasu, Iæaki Arbelaitz and Haizea. I am grateful to them not only for their practical assistance in data collection, but also for their many insightful comments about language and its place in Oiartzun town life. Thanks also to Oiartzuners Katrin Abal, Ana Arruti, JosØ Luis iv Erkizia, Pili Lekuona, Inaxio Retegi and the Oiartzun Municipal Archive for help with this project. Xabier Artiagoitia for some extremely insightful discussions about Basque linguistics over the last several years, and also for critical readings of portions of the material presented here. NYU Linguistics professor Anna Szabolcsi, who though not a member of my dissertation committee, has contributed much to this project and taught me a great deal about Linguistics over the last six years. Former teachers at the University of the Basque Country including, especially, Benjam(cid:237)n Tejerina and Iæaki Mart(cid:237)nez de Luna. My graduate classmates at NYU for being smart and friendly, especially Philipp Angermeyer, Stefan Benus, Maryam Bakht-Rofheart, Oana Ciucivara, Cece Cutler, Komlan Essizewa, Paul DeDecker, Meredith Josey, Ken Lacy, Tom Leu, Lisa Levinson, Erez Levon, Laureen Lim, Simanique Moody, Jennifer Nycz, Laura Rimell, Chanti Seymour, Erika Solyom, Laurie Woods and Eytan Zweig. The National Science Foundation and the Fulbright program for grants supporting this work. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0317842. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Also Estibaliz Amorrortu, Mark Baker, Gurprit Bains, Mark Baltin, John Costello, Maia Duguine, Arantzazu Elordieta, Sheryl Estrada, Urtzi Etxeberria, v Diamandis Gafos, Jone Miren HernÆndez, Aritz Irurtzun, Lorraine Jerome, Itziar Laka, Javier Ormazabal, Shirley Smalls-Smith, Jon Ortiz de Urbina, Juan Uriagereka, Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria, Jaqueline Urla, Koldo Zuazo, the HIM taldea of the University of the Basque Country in Gasteiz, and audiences at BIDE 04, PLC 29, NWAV 33, the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Ottawa and the University of York. I am solely responsible for all shortcomings of the following work. v i ABSTRACT This dissertation has two sets of goals. The first half of this dissertation focuses on language change in a Basque dialect. Following the end of the Franquist dictatorship in 1975, a new Basque standard, Batua, was introduced into Basque schools and media. Since then, a generation of speakers has grown up exposed to Batua in these domains, which suggests the possibility that younger speakers will borrow features from Batua into their vernacular, leading to change in local dialects. This dissertation examines variation between Batua and dialectal features in the town of Oiartzun in an effort to gauge this process of change. Data were gathered in sociolinguistic and ethnographic interviews with forty speakers of Oiartzun Basque. A principal claim of this study is that this variation must be understood in terms of ideologies of modernity and social and economic changes in town life since 1975. The fact that emblematic features of local speech are not giving way to competing standard forms is plausibly related to a rise in dialectal loyalty, which is in turn related to recent changes in town life. Many community members understand standardization as part of a broader process of modernization and economic development that has been advantageous in many ways, but also brought other unwanted changes, including the loss of many traditional practices. The ambivalence of many younger speakers toward these changes is reflected in their attitudes toward Batua features and their use of these. vi i The second half of this dissertation discusses topics in Basque syntax in view of cross-dialectal variation in speaker intuitions. This discussion includes an account of two kinds of (cid:147)restructuring(cid:148) phenomena(cid:151)auxiliary switch and long distance agreement (LDA)(cid:151)which are subject to different locality restrictions: auxiliary switch is restricted to single iterations of the clausal functional sequence, while LDA is possible out of a small (~VP) complement of the matrix V. It is shown that these different locality restrictions on restructuring follow trivially from the different syntactic phenomena responsible for them, and, therefore no special locality restrictions on (cid:147)restructuring(cid:148) per se need be invoked. vi ii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT vii LIST OF FIGURES xiii LIST OF TABLES xiv LIST OF MAPS xvii LIST OF APPENDICES xviii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I. Language variation and change in Oiartzun 13 CHAPTER 1. The development of Batua 14 1.1 Language shift 15 1.2 Modern language maintenance efforts 22 1.3 Reactions to Batua: Dialect loyalty and dialect use 42 in oppositional discourse 1.4 Conclusion 44 CHAPTER 2. Oiartzun and its languages 46 2.1 An overview of the speech community 47 2.2 The dialect(s) of Oiartzun 51 2.3 What(cid:146)s wrong with Oiartzun? 63 2.3.1 Transportation and housing development since 1975 64 ix 2.3.2 The Church in town life since 1975 84 2.4 Dialect loyalty in Oiartzun 91 2.5 Conclusion 105 CHAPTER 3. Methodology 106 3.1 Corpus 1 106 3.2 Corpus 2 113 CHAPTER 4. Data and discussion 115 4.1 Data 115 4.1.1 Participial affix doubling 117 4.1.2 /t/-palatalization 125 4.1.3 naz vs. naiz 142 4.1.4 Dative displacement 145 4.1.5 a-roots in izan: za/ga vs. zea/gea 149 4.2 Discussion 154 4.2.1 The problem of education and age 154 4.2.2 Standardization, dialect loyalty and language change 160 4.2.3 za/ga vs. zea/gea: dialect loyalty and dialect shift 170 4.2.4 The problem of younger speakers 172 4.2.5 Standardization and gender 178 4.3 Conclusion 193 PART II. Aspects of non-finite complementation in Basque 196 CHAPTER 5. The dual identity of Basque (cid:147)participles(cid:148) 197 x