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

24 BRIAN D. JOSEPHIf similarities in contact situations are focused on the surface, it thereforebecomes potentially problematic to view the syntactic similarities amongBalkan languages in terms of deep syntactic features such as parameter settings,as Rudin (1988) did, for instance, for parallels in multiple wh-questionconstructions in Bulgarian and Romanian. Sprachbund significance for suchfeatures would be inconsistent with their deep nature, since the '"action" in languagecontact, so to speak, is at the surface, not at a deep level, yet contact iscrucial for the development of a Sprachbund.Third—and this is a problem that pervades much of Balkan linguistics—most of the relevant studies have been based just on a comparison of the modernstandard languages, when in fact the crucial period for the "Balkanization" ofall the languages in the Balkan Sprachbund was some 400 to 700 years ago andinvolved contact at the level of the regional dialects, not of the standard languages.Instructive here is the observation made by Masica (1976) and secondedby Campbell et al. (1986) that some linguistic areas are "the relics of past contacts,no longer active and others are in the process of for-mation and extensionbecause of on-going interaction and change" (Campbell et al.. 533). Most of thefeatures that make the Balkan Sprachbund interesting are ones that are the resultof past contacts, not ongoing contact in the present day.In a sense then, looking at an on-going contact situation such as thatmentioned above involving Urdu, Marathi, and Kannada speakers in Kupwar ismore crucial for understanding the Balkan Sprachbund than are constructs frommodern syntactic theory. Similarly, current contact within Greece involvingstandard Modern Greek interacting with Arvanitika, the variety of Tosk Albanianspoken in Greece for some 600 years or more, or Aromanian, also known asVlach, the variety of Romanian spoken in Greece for at least several centuries,provides important insights into the formation of the Balkan Sprachbund, forthese typically village-based situations approximate the contact situation in theBalkans 600 years or so ago in ways that an examination or comparison of thevarious present-day, generally urban-based, standard languages cannot. What onesees in examining the urban standards is perhaps the aftereffects of contactseveral centuries ago, but it is not such a direct window on the conditions thatgave rise to the Sprachbund effects.As an example 9 of insights from such relatively recent contact in theBalkans, consider the following, which involves the assimilation of the interpretationof the understood subject with the gerund in Arvanitika to the currentGreek pattern for the present active participle (or "gerund") in -ondas. In what isthe result of an innovation that most likely took place in fairly late MedievalGreek, given the fixing of the current form of the gerund in that period, 2 " theModern Greek -ondas form permits an interpretation of its understood subject ascoreferent only with a main-clause subject, as in (5):(5) Ojdnisj i ide ti mariaj; perpatdndas[/*j j s to dromo.the-John-NOM saw-3SG the-Mary-ACC walk-GRD on the-road'John saw Mary while he/*she was walking on the road.'