2025 Theses

At the Limits of Catalan: Alguerese as a Contact Language

Meisel, Alexander

The Alguerese dialect of Catalan, spoken since the 14th century in the Sardinian town of Alghero, presents a unique problem within the subfield of Catalan dialectology: namely, that its idiosyncrasies cannot be explained by comparing it solely to other Catalan dialects. Rather, Alguerese is better understood as a contact language situated between general Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and Sassarese. Building on prior work which considers the phonology, lexicon, and semantics of Alguerese from a contact perspective, this thesis is the first work which so considers the grammar. Relying on descriptive grammars of the dialect by Palomba (1906) and Pais (1970), this thesis proposes novel syntactic analyses of Alguerese polar questions and possessive noun phrases, as well as novel morphological analyses of the past perfective, imperfect subjunctive, and adjective iteration in order to conclude that the grammar of Alguerese demonstrates evidence of contact between Catalan and Sardinian.

Keywords: Lingustics, Alguerese, Alghero, Catalan, Sardinian, Sassarese, Romance Lingustics, Dialectology, Sardinia