Bilingual competence, complementizer selection and mood in Cimbrian

Abstract

The system of Cimbrian embedded declarative clauses unfolds a puzzle w.r.t. the correlation between mood and complementizer selection. As a matter of fact, two different complementizers, i.e. az and ke, can select subjunctive or indicative in predictable contexts: az co-occurs with subjunctive in modal sentences whereas ke introduces indicative in purely declarative clauses, thus a perfectly binary pattern emerges. However, the data we collected in translation tasks from Italian into Cimbrian show the existence of an unexpected symmetry-breaking structure, namely ke + subjunctive. The scenario is even more complex, though, since another unexpected pattern shows up which concerns the 1st person plural. In this very specific context only one complementizer is possible. The aim of our contribution is twofold: (i) accounting for the nature of the two Cimbrian complementizer az and ke and mood selection; (ii) explaining to what extent the two aforementioned unexpected phenomena are connected with contact-induced grammatical change.