Two euroversals in a global perspective : auxiliation and alignment

A number of studies in linguistic typology over the past few years have concentrated on what have come to be called ‘euroversals’. In this paper, I shall examine two of them, viz. accusative alignment and the occurrence of a ‘have’/‘be’ alternation in perfective auxiliation. Focusing on Romance dialects, I will show that thorough inspection of dialect variation in (a subset of) the languages of Europe provides crucial insights that have escaped so far the attention of typologists who dealt with these topics. The main results are that, firstly, alternation in perfective auxiliation is not accusatively aligned and, hence, the two euroversals at issue are mutually contradictory; and that, secondly, variation and change in perfective auxiliation across time and space in Romance reflects a shift in the alignment properties of the varieties at issue. More generally, the moral of the present discussion is that serious consideration of dialect variation is a necessary precondition for dispelling the commonplace that represents Europe as a rather dull linguistic landscape with very little structural diversity.