Language contact as innovation: the case of Cimbrian

Traditionally, language contact studies have dealt with grammatical interference between two languages. Clearly, the case of Cimbrian is unique in that its linguistic system results from contact with two different languages: German, which belongs to the same family that Cimbrian is commonly considered to belong to (Germanic) and Italian, which belongs to a different language family (Romance). For this reason, this dissertation has two main aims: First and foremost, it aims to provide the first theoretical account for three relevant morpho-syntactic features of Cimbrian: adjectival ordering, participial forms, and auxiliary selection. These three case studies were purposefully chosen as being representative of the impact the two source languages had on the receiving language. Second, by looking at the three aforementioned cases, it ultimately aims to lay ground- work for further research on theoretical approaches to language variation and innovation via language contact.