Ënghe, ence and also anche: Ladin and Italian additive particles in language contact situations

The contribution examines the behaviour of additive particles in a specific language contact situation, namely the Ladin speaking area in Trentino-South Tyrol (Italy). Ladin is a minority language spoken by ca. 30,000 speakers, whose linguistic repertoires include also Italian (Fassa valley) and German (Badia and Gardena valleys). The analysis of corpus of bilingual speech shows that, contrary to other types of particles (such as discourse markers), there is no borrowing of additive particles from Italian and German to Ladin. Nevertheless, the contact with these languages affects the position and scope of additive particles in the utterance, especially in Badia and Gardena Ladin.