At the end of 1998, Professor Pieter Muysken was awarded the Spinoza prize of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NOW) and set up a research program entitled Lexicon and Syntax. The implementation of the Program started in the autumn of 1999 with research on the lexicon and syntax in a number of areas where contacts between 1 different languages are intensive. For the languages of many of the areas selected, basic data had to be collected. For most of the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund area, however, there are grammars and dictionaries. Moreover, quite a number of studies of the Balkan Spra- bund features have been published. Accordingly, when I joined the team of the Project, I aimed at a description of the state of art in the field. After several months of research, I realized that Balkanists have mainly been concerned with compiling lists of similarities and making parallels between the lexical and grammatical forms of the Balkan languages, while analyses of the interaction of the Balkan Sprachbund morpho-syntactic features with other features in the structure of the DP or the sentence of a given language/dialect are scarce. This oriented me towards descriptions of Balkan Spra- bund morpho-syntactic features in the context of individual sub-systems in nine Balkan language to which they relate the Slavic languages Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbo-C- atian; the Romance languages Romanian, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian; Albanian; Modern Greek; and the Arli Balkan Romani dialect.

Discusses the morpho-syntactic Balkan Sprachbund features in nine languages Contains a wealth of Balkan linguistic material, collected from both the existing literature sources and from the author's own field work The use of a minimally technical terminology allows for a cross-framework accessibility of the data

Klappentext

This book discusses the morpho-syntactic Balkan Sprachbund features in nine languages in which they are most numerous. It contains a wealth of Balkan linguistic material, collected from both the existing literature sources and from the author's own field work. Rather than making parallel lists of convergent phenomena, the author focuses on displaying similarities and differences in the representation of the most widely acknowledged Balkan Sprachbund morpho-syntactic features and their interaction with other features in the structure of the DP or the sentence of individual languages. The book stands at the intersection of traditional and formal linguistics. The use of a minimally technical terminology allows for a cross-framework accessibility of the data.

The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of comparative linguistics and Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Megle-no-Romanian, Aromanian, Albanian, Modern Greek and Balkan Romani languages.

Inhalt

From the contents

Preface. Less Common Alphabet Symbols. Abbreviations and Symbols.- Introduction.- Ethno-Historical Considerations.- Cases and Articles.- Clitic Clusters and Clitic Doubling.- The Perfect and the Evidential.- Infinitives and Subjunctives.- Appendix One: Core Vocabularies. Appendix Two: Sample Texts. Appendix Three: Languages Spoken on the Balkans.- References: Books and papers referred to in the text. Reference grammars.- Subject index. Language index.- Author index.