Das zweifache Komplementierersystem im Zimbrischen: romanische Entlehnung und Eigenentwicklung

Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties in the Northeast of Italy and represents an ideal object of analysis for investigating some specific issues in language contact, such as the borrowing of functional words. In this article, we first provide a detailed description of the Cimbrian subordination system putting forward an analysis of both the Romance loanword ke and the native complementizer az; secondly, we try to generalize the concept of ‘functional loanword’ comparing Cimbrian with typologically different languages. In a nutshell, we propose a common grammaticalization path, by which functional words borrowed from a model language always enter the topmost positions of the left periphery of the replica language and possibly end up occurring in lower positions.