Kashubian – its Middle Low German heritage as partial superstrate

Abstract

Abstract This article is about a Slavic language that has undergone massive lexical and grammatical influence from medieval Low German (MLG). As it has retained its fundamentally Slavic character, we focus on the heritage status of Low German intruding into what essentially remains Slavic typologically. Kashubian is West Slavic with a considerable (Middle) Low German heritage. As expected for a substrate language, such as Kashubian, there is considerable lexical, but minor syntactic German influence in Kashubian. Yet, one main typological characteristic of Slavic Kashubian and Polish, the cross-Slavic aspect and tense paradigm has been expanded by the miec ʻhave’ and the bëc ʻbe’ periphrases expressing tense in the sense of the German perfect tense using the verbal bracket. We trace the change from the pretemporal periphrastic predicative construction (subject-PP-Aux) and the attributive pattern (subject-Aux-PP) in Kashubian (and Polish), as opposed to the superstate German tense periphrasis and the verbal bracket “subject [-Aux-object-PP]” or “subject-object-PP-Aux”; its link to the Polish aspect and simple tense pattern. And we ask the question: are there evolutionary genetic components in the heritage situation that might lead to genetic patterns of natural L-change and grammaticalization? This paper is based on the view that grammar change in a heritage language like Kashubian is not necessarily a case of Darwinian (genetic) evolution in that the targets are seldom cognitively encapsulated procedural parts of grammar (such as the German verbal bracket in dependent clauses of German). The reason is that the latter is structural in Low German, the superstrate language, while it may be used both structurally and relationally in Kashubian and non-structurally (i.e., only relationally) in Polish. Much rather, the cognitively accessible, declarative content of grammars is open for social changes (lexical inventories and their paradigms). Theoretically, the paper is framed under modern heritage considerations (Kelleher, Ann. 2010. What is a heritage language? Davis: University of California. http://www.cal.org/heritage/pdfs/briefs/What-is-a-Heritage-Language.pdf (accessed 26 February 2021); Polinsky, Maria. 2018. Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Polinsky, Maria & Gregory Scontras. 2019. Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 1–17; Scontras, Gregory & Michael T. Putnam. 2020. Lesser studied Heritage Languages: An Appeal to the Dyad. Heritage Language Journal. 152–155).