An investigation into the functional syntax of spoken Basque

We investigate the motivation for the structural diversity of utterances encountered within a corpus of spontaneous conversations produced by native speakers of the Azpeitian dialect of Basque. The genre of spontaneous spoken language has not---to my knowledge---been employed before to account for the information structure of Basque. Specifically, we measure the isomorphism between pragmatic functions and syntactic structures in affirmative main clauses.; While a Basque main clause can in theory contain three nominal arguments and any number of adjuncts, frequency counts of our data show that most main clauses contain only one overt argument, while the second most frequent clauses are verb-only. Results of this study confirm the adequacy of Du Bois' Preferred Argument structure constraint for ergative languages (1987). These tendencies also parallel the distribution of lexical mentions observed for Nootka (Jacobsen 1993), and English (Thompson and Hopper 2001). In addition, only eleven instances of SOV clauses occur in the study set of 553 main clauses, which challenges the traditional and typological characterizations of Basque word order.; For each lexical argument, the features of anaphoricity (previous mention), topic persistence, discourse structure identification, and givenness (morphological form), were measured separately, based on positional oppositions (SV ∼ VS, etc.). Preverbal position seems the favored site for old and new arguments, for all argument roles. In addition, there was a surprising frequency of occurrence of lexical arguments, both NPs and Pronouns.; Findings support the typological characterization of Basque as a verb-final language. Also, we note that Delayed Focus is not a common option, which supports the traditional characterization of the preverbal position as the privileged site for focused arguments. However, the data has shown that narrow focused arguments tend to be old, against the perception of their being the bearers of new information.; Transcriptions of the corpus include a phonemic rendering of the conversations as produced in the Azpeitian dialect of Basque, as well as into standard ( batua) Basque. It is hoped that these transcripts, along with a description of the morphophonemic features of the dialect of Azpeitia, contribute to the appreciation of this vital yet underdescribed variety of the language.