“I gang ge bachhopsë.” A Swabian grammaticalization story

The German dialect Swabian features a propositive construction consisting of a form of the verb ‘to go’, a particle ge and an infinitive (‘I gang ge schaffë’). This construction has the same roots as the Alemannic verb doubling construction, but has not proceeded as far on the grammaticalization cline. In this article, a scenario of the grammaticalization, that is, the semantic bleaching process and the syntactic reanalysis of the Swabian propositive and the Alemannic verb doubling construction is presented, taking into account the syntactic properties of either construction.