The Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area program (original) (raw)

"Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics" Vol. 3 | Issue 1 | June 2023

Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in Linguistics, 2023

Balcania et Slavia. Studi linguistici | Studies in linguistics is a newly founded international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the modern Slavic and Balkan languages from the perspective of theoretical, areal-typological, and contrastive linguistics. The Journal intends to promote high-quality scholarly work on all topics relevant to the theoretical description and analysis of Slavic and Balkan languages in synchrony as well as in diachrony. The main areas of interest include, but are not limited to, their structural make-up, contact in space and time, variation and microvariation in the Balkan-Slavic area, first and second language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual environments. Although it is based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Journal aims at providing an international academic platform where scholars and researchers working within both the traditional and the more recently developed experimental frameworks can share novel ideas and advance theoretical proposals in the field of Slavic and Balkan linguistics.

Indeed, Nothing Lost in the Balkans: Assessing Morphosyntactic Convergence in an Areal Context 1

Balkanistica, 2020

Convergence by loss is a concept that is often adduced to characterize the Balkans as a linguistic area and to substantiate the areality of particular linguistic features, developments and varieties. Time and again, it has been pointed out that however useful this concept may be for certain purposes, e.g., when descriptively stating differences between historical stages of one specific variety, it is problematic for others, in particular for comparing languages and assessing areality. In addition to implying the undisputed existence of categorial distinctions, applying this concept indiscriminately obscures the fact that its manifestations may differ substantially across features and languages. Furthermore, focusing on “loss” impedes insight into both more general and more specific processes. On the examples of case and infinitive in the standard norms of Albanian and Macedonian this article acts on these intuitions and elaborates a finer-grained approach that avoids the assumption of generally applicable categorial distinctions and the ignoring of differences below seemingly identical surface phenomena. By the decomposition of linguistic units into their constitutive morphosyntactic features it becomes possible to sketch the interaction of morphosyntactic exponents in expressing characteristic functions, such as the selection of grammatical relations or the licensing of constituency. This provides a solid empirical basis for comparing morphosyntactic patterns across languages in synchronic and diachronic respects and may be operationalized for assessing the areality of particular developments.

Digital analysis of Balkan phraseology

2021

One of the most characteristic features of the Balkan Sprachbund is the way in which idiomatic phrases cross from one language to the next with such apparent ease, and the way in which they give such a Balkan "fl avor" to each individual language. The collection and analysis of such instances is an ongoing, and important, contribution to our understanding of Balkan culture and the homo balcanicus. The focus of such contrastive phraseology studies is primarily semantic. In contrast, my focus here is the phrase as a grammatical construct, defi ned roughly as a "grammatically signifi cant group of tokens, the meaning of which it is not possible to tag at the level of the individual token". My examples are taken from Slavic (primarily Bulgarian), but because many represent wellknown morphosyntactic "Balkanisms", the discussion frame is broader. Not all such phrases are specifi cally Balkan. Refl exive verbs, for instance, which consist of a main verb form and a refl exive particle (such as разбира се 'it is understood') are found in non-Balkan South Slavic as well. Similarly, many compound verb forms are found in both Balkan and non-Balkan languages: these include perfect-like tense forms such as дошли сме 'we have come' or бяхме дошли 'we had come' and modal-like future forms such as ще дойда 'I will come' or щях да дойда 'I would have come / was about to come'. Other compound verbs are more specifi cally Balkan. One is the Romance perfect, which is much better known in Macedonian (e.g. имам доjдено 'I have come') but is also found in Bulgarian dialects. The most well-known, however, is the renarrated mood, also called the evidential, which in the third person forms the phrase Ø дошли 'they [apparently] came'. The obvious common feature to all these forms is the combination of an auxiliary and a main verb form: in the Bulgarian examples, the auxiliary is a form of съм in the perfect-like tenses, a form of ща in the modal-like future tenses, and zero in the third person forms of the renarrated.

In and Around the Balkans: Romance Languages and the Making of Layered Languages

Journal of Language Contact

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

Towards Common Balkan Lexical Evidential Markers

Slovene

A simple listing of lexical evidential markers in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian uncovers unusual problems, because a significant part of the markers are common, both due to genetic relations between the languages (e.g. Bulg. and Maced. spored) and to areal factors (e.g. Turk. word güya / gûya was loaned into Bulg. dialectal gyoa, Maced. ǵoa and Alb. gjoja; this marker also exists in Serb.). But these common markers with the same etymology do not necessarily have similar meanings, which is both a theoretical problem for the description of the language data and a practical issue for translation between the languages. As Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian have grammatical evidential systems as well, there is a question how the lexical evidential markers interact with evidential forms. Here the distinction between analytic and holistic reading can be quite helpful, as it clarifies the role of each of the components in constructions. In the article it is analysed on the basis of tra...

LANGUAGE CORPORA IN THE WEST BALKANS - HISTORY CURRENT STATE AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVE

The West Balkans has had a rich history in developing language corpora. The first electronic corpus in the region was created only a few years after the very first one in the world, while the idea of developing electronic language resources dates even to a decade before that. This early development of natural language processing was somewhat hampered by the unfortunate events of the 1990s but in the last two decades there has been some substantial improvement when it comes to the West Balkan languages.

Areal typology and Balkan (morpho-)syntax

Balkan Syntax and (Universal) Principles of Grammar Ed. by Krapova, Iliyana / Joseph, Brian Series:Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 285, 2018

The paper presents the authorʼs individual views on the state of affairs and presents theoretical, methodological and practical results, obtained by him in the last decade in the field of the comparative-historical and comparative-contrastive Balkan linguistics and especially of (morpho-)syntax. The major theoretical issues of Balkan linguistics like principles of genetical, areal, social or contact determination or restriction in language evolution are being addressed. The historical, structuralist and functionalist methods of research in Balkan dialectology (collecting the (morpho-)syntactic data, their mapping, systemic and contrastive analysis) are being applied. In the introduction a new definition of a (Balkan) Sprachbund is being promoted, as " a language group defined by functional, not substantional properties ". Further a number of general, areal, particular and universal (morpho-)syntactic phenomena are being presented, like (1) redundancy in Balkan grammar; (2) contact-related convergent syntactic structures; (3) two-languages-in-contact induced morphosyntactic changes; (4) borrowability hierarchies in the (history of the) Balkan languages. It is claimed for ex., that Balkanisms (" the shared common Balkan features ") should be opposed to anti-Balkanisms (" features that were never shared (borrowed) despite similar conditions of contact "); that the causes of Balkan convergence are to be seen in multiple language shifts (substratum phenomena) rather than in balanced bi-or trilingualism; that although a cross-linguistic comparison of (morpho-)syntax involving Balkan languages is truly possible, the study of " comparative (morpho-)syntax of the Balkan languages " can, but should not obligatorily discover parts of the " comparative Balkan (morpho-)syntax ". In conclusion the major tasks and desiderata of contemporary Balkan linguistics are being summarized.

Morphology versus Syntax in the Balkan Verbal Complex

Balkan syntax and (universal) principles of grammar, 2018

Various Balkan languages have a string of material called here the "verbal complex", in which a verb occurs with various markers for tense, modality , negation, and argument structure. We examine here this verbal complex with regard to its status as a syntactic element or a morphological element. First, we carefully outline the theoretical basis for determining the status of a given entity and we then argue that the verbal complexes display different degrees of morphologization in the different languages. Albanian and Greek show the highest degree of morphologization of the verbal complex, with Macedonian close to them in this regard. Bulgarian shows a lesser degree of morphologization than Macedonian, making for an interesting split within East South Slavic, and Serbian shows an even lesser degree. We argue further that certain aspects of the verbal complex, especially in the languages with the greatest morphologization, represent contact-related convergence, and draw from this a general claim about the role of surface structure in language contact.