Iragankortasunaren dinamikaz zubereran, bigarren etapa: barneko ekonomia, hizkuntza ukipena eta edo egileari buruzko ikusmolde berria [Transitivity dynamic in Souletine dialect: internal economy, language contact or a new view about the agent?]

Abstract

This article is the second part of a study devoted to certain bivalent verbs of Souletine Basque dialect, called “bivalent verbs with double casual marking” (FLV, 100, 2005). At the present time in Basque Souletine dialect, there are two different ways to construct more than thirty bivalent verbs and retain the same meaning. They have a double case and indicial marking with change of the auxiliary. They are rather low verbs in a semantic scale of transitivity. Constructions with izan “to be” are rather used by older speakers, while younger Bascophones tend to use constructions with *edün “to have”. The conditioning of a linguistic variation and of a linguistic change is generally complex and difficult to update. The postulated evolution could be due to:

– the internal economy of the language, analogical attraction, since the two structures in competition already co-exist; substitution due to the weak functional output of construction with izan, and memory-saving without loss of the distinction of the two arguments;

– language contact: intra-linguistic contact between the dialect and Unified Basque or others Basque varieties for the construction of some verbs, and contact between languages, French/Basque (indirect loan translations);

– or, this being the most daring assumption, due to an external factor like the evolution of the way of life and thought in which the argument having to do with experience is seen more and more like an agent.

The difficulty of this research is found in the necessity of validating these potential factors and then of evaluating the respective weight of them, according to the verbs considered. As a conclusion, a summary table of the studied factors is proposed.