"Feitac espravi dutuçu": partizipio sail berri bat Zuberoan

Abstract

During the last centuries Souletin Basque has developed a new group of verbs ended in -i. Romance-origin forms such as akabi 'to end', ataki 'to attack' or ezkapi 'to escape' differ from the ancient Basque participles pertaining to the -i class of verbs. In fact, every new verb in -i has an equivalent within the -tu class (e.g. akabatü, atakatü, ezkapatü), with which it tends to a complementary distribution of forms and functions. This paper analyses the new group of participles in the light of a far-reaching corpus of Souletin texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Firstly, I will describe the forms and functions of the new verbs ended in -i (§ 2), and I will systematically collect their attestations (§ 3). From a diachronic point of view, the competition between the new forms and their pairs ended in -tu will be addressed (§ 4). Then I shall argue that new forms in -i are due to language contact with Gascon; more specifically, they originated in the borrowing of inflected verbal forms to Bearnese Gascon (§ 5). Finally, I will discuss some other forms ending in -i which have not yet acquired full verbal nature (§ 6).