The periphrasis tuen + infinitive in Saurian

This article provides a systematic investigation of the periphrasis tuen (‘do’) + infinitive in Saurian, a Southern Bavarian variety spoken in the linguistic enclave of Sauris/Zahre in Carnia (Friuli, Italy). Drawing on three complementary sources of data, namely a corpus extracted from the Zahrer Wörterbuch, acceptability judgments from native speakers, and semi-spontaneous narrative data, the study examines the morphosyntactic distribution and functional properties of the construction. The results show that the periphrasis is subject to restrictions similar to those found in other Upper German dialect varieties. The analysis further shows that the construction is favored with phonologically complex verbs and, above all, in contexts where intervening elements such as pronouns, negation, adverbs, etc. occur. These findings suggest that the periphrasis is best interpreted primarily as a morphosyntactic phenomenon, determined by sentence structure and information organization, rather than by aspectual meanings.