Comparative Syntax of the Balkan Languages (Oxford ... - Cryptm.org

IS BALKAN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX POSSIBLE? 19English. A Sprachbund is an area where long-term intense and intimate contactamong speakers of several different languages has led to massive structuralconvergence in languages that were once quite different from one another. 9 Thelanguages of the Balkans constitute perhaps the best-known and most deeplyinvestigated case, but other examples include South Asia (Masica 1976) andMeso-America (Campbell, et al. 1986). Among the syntactic characteristics ofthese other Sprachbunde are, for South Asia, the use of conjunctive participlesfor serialization, SOV word order, and dative subject constructions, and forMeso-America, the occurrence of nominal possession of the type his-dog theman,the absence of switch reference marking, and nonverb-final word order (vs.SOV languages in surrounding areas). 1 "Still, some of these results, especially those from the generatively basedinvestigations mentioned above, may well pose some problems when viewedfrom the Sprachbund perspective, since Sprachbund phenomena generally areattributed to language contact in some form. The exact nature of the contact thatleads to a Sprachbund is often a matter of some controversy, in that there isdebate as to whether it is substrate influence from one population shifting to atarget language, superstrate influence of one language over the others in the area,massive bi- or multilingualism often of an imperfect sort, sociolinguisticaccommodation, or some combination of such situations that has led to theconvergence in the Sprachbund. Nonetheless, contact in some form is invariablyresponsible, and language contact would seem to be more of an accidentalhappenstance in the history of particular languages that could render comparativesyntax less interesting than it might otherwise be.It is valuable therefore to explore this issue more deeply; accordingly, inwhat follows, four ways in which the results of some types of comparativesyntactic investigations are potentially problematic are discussed in some detail,with an eye toward determining whether the enterprise of comparative Balkansyntax is possible and if so, to what limits it is subject. With those issuesaddressed, some specific case studies involving negation in the Balkans arediscussed in order to illustrate what different approaches to comparative Balkansyntax might yield in the way of insights.2. Some problematic aspects of comparative syntax in the BalkansFirst, it seems fair to ask whether the results that have been obtained from recentgenerative comparisons of the syntax of various Balkan languages are revealingbeyond what might be found if one were to compare any arbitrary set of typologicallyrelated languages chosen on a basis other than geography. That is to say,especially when one realizes the role that language contact has played in shapingthe Balkan languages, in what way does a claim about parallels in the structureof the clause among the Balkan languages advance our knowledge? For instance,the analysis given by Rivero (1994) for verb movement in the Balkans, whichproposes the structure in (1) for the "Balkan clause":