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Article published In:
Language Ecology
Vol. 4:2 (2020) ► pp.151–174

Language contact in the Balkan Sprachbund

A study of transparency in Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, Italian, and Greek

| University of Maryland, College Park

This study investigates the meaning-form interface in the Balkan Sprachbund (BS), by researching five different languages: Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Greek. I consider two models that account for recurring properties of the relevant languages in the Sprachbund: convergence and diglossia. If convergence is the cause behind shared features typical of the BS, that predicts that Bulgarian and Romanian would be more transparent than Russian and Italian. Under the diglossic analysis, Koine Greek is assumed to be the source of shared features, which predicts that the BS languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, would be similar. To compare the two models, I investigate twenty-four opacity features, divided into five categories: Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning split in two or more forms), Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one), and a group of typical BS features. The results are consistent with the diglossia model: Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek manifest similar features, which points in the direction of diglossia as the underlying cause of language similarity.

Keywords: transparency, language contact, Balkan Sprachbund, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, diglossia
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Transparency and language contact
  • 2.The Balkan Sprachbund
    • 2.1The features
    • 2.2Explanations of properties pertaining to the Balkan Sprachbund
      • 2.2.1Kortmann’s theory
    • 2.3Hypothesis and predictions
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Functional Discourse Grammar
    • 3.2Transparency in FDG
    • 3.3The features
      • 3.3.1Morphosyntactic features
        • 3.3.1.1Dependent verbs
        • 3.3.1.2Analytic future and subjunctive formation
        • 3.3.1.3Grammaticalized definiteness
        • 3.3.1.4Clitic doubling
        • 3.3.1.5Case morphology
    • 3.4Materials and methods
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/le.20003.seg
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