| Summary: | The subject of my Thesis is the syntactic interference of German in the French of the Moselle region. The geographical location of this Department, situated close to the German border, leads me to believe that French and German are in contact in this region given their geographic proximity and the history of the area. My Thesis is divided into two main sections. First, through a detailed analysis of relevant syntactic structures in French and German, I put forth several hypotheses concerning the syntactic interference of German in the French spoken in the Moselle Department. Then, I tested these hypotheses through extensive fieldwork by interviewing two different groups of speakers, young and old, and by analyzing those data produced which indicated some degree of German interference in French. I then submitted these data to the same speakers to obtain their grammaticality judgments. My analysis has led me to establish an important typological distinction between the sentences produced by the younger speakers and those produced by the elderly, and to uncover a hierarchy in the acceptability of the sentences submitted to these speakers, which I discuss and attempt to explain.
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