Syntactic calquing in Germanic-Romance contact: West Flemish under French influence

Abstract

The article investigates the contact influence of the French language on the West Flemish language variety, specifically analyzing syntactic restructuring in complex sentences. The aim of the study is to demonstrate that, under the influence of French, the syntactic system of the West Flemish language variety underwent changes at the level of relative and interrogative pronouns. The article examines the French relative pronouns “qui” and “que”, including their complex variants “ce qui” and “ce que”, alongside their counterparts in West Flemish, while drawing a typological parallel with the Swedish language. The scientific novelty of the study lies in applying the binominal sentence theory to the analysis of contact-induced changes in West Flemish syntax: for the first time, it is shown that the binominal theory accounts for the mechanism behind the redistribution of relative pronoun functions and reveals the Pan-Germanic typological conditioning for the emergence of complex structures containing relative pronouns. As a result of the study, it is established that under contact influence from French, the West Flemish idiom redistributed the functions of the Dutch pronouns “die” / “dat” between explicit and inexplicit types of subject relativization. Furthermore, it developed complex pronominal structures (such as “wuk dat”), which are structurally and functionally analogous to French “ce qui” / “ce que” and Scandinavian constructions featuring pronoun retention; thus, West Flemish emerges as a linguistic system whose Germanic base displays a predisposition toward restructuring in accordance with Romance syntactic patterns.