Vass doon miah aekshli lanna…? Die tun+Infinitiv-Konstruktion in Pennsylvaniadeutsch

This paper investigates the use of the do periphrasis in Pennsylvania German (PDC) under the conditions of language contact through translation from English (ENG). The main focus is on interrogative sentences where the do construction is not unusual, but certainly not grammaticalized. Thus, questions can be built with two functionally equivalent variants, the finite lexical verb (1) and the auxiliary construction with du ‘do’ plus infinitive (2): (1) Vass sawkt di Bivvel? (translation of: What does the Bible say?) (2) Vass doon miah aekshli lanna funn di Bivvel? (translation of: What does the Bible really teach?) Construction (2) mirrors the grammaticalized English do-support construction. The data analysis, based on an ENG–PDC translation corpus as well as on relevant comparative texts, shows an expanding use of the do construction, which is additionally increased by the translation process.