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The Historical Syntax of South Slavic
Project Description
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The project investigates
syntactic change in the history of South Slavic. We have so far focused on
the following areas: (i) clausal pronominal clitics; (ii) linearization of the Tense Phrase; (iii)
determiners, and (iv) aspect.
We have discovered (Pancheva
2005) that clausal pronominal clitics in the
history of Bulgarian have undergone a change from post-verbal to second-position,
and that this change was already under way in Old Church Slavonic.
Establishing that a second-position clitic system
developed within Medieval South Slavic challenges the generally held
assumption that second-position cliticization in
the modern Slavic languages is directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
Even more importantly, the project appears to have documented the first
case of such a historical change for any language. Several studies describe
a historical loss of second-position clitics, but
there have been no examples of an emergence of a second-position clitic system.
Concerning the interaction
between the syntax of the clause and the grammar of clitics,
results suggest that already Old Church Slavonic was undergoing a switch in
the linearization of the Tense Phrase (TP), from head-final to head-initial
(Pancheva 2008, 2009b). One factor triggering this change was likely a
change in the syntax of Negation, which started to attract the tensed verb.
With Negation preceding the Verb Phrase (VP), the tensed verb would be linearized before the VP as well. We suggest that the
resulting change in the linearization of T with respect to its complement
VP then triggered the syntactic reanalysis of clitics
from post-verbal to second-position ones. Clitics
were attracted by a feature of T, and when T changed its linear order with
respect to the VP, so did the clitics. We further
discuss (Pancheva 2009a) whether the prosodic alignment of clitics is lexically specified or is a consequence of
the syntactic structure.
The
project has also yielded findings concerning historical change in the
syntax and meaning of the determiner oba
‘two/both’ (Łazorczyk
and Pancheva 2005, 2008). Whereas oba is
a distributive determiner in all of the modern Slavic languages that have
the form, we show that in Old Church Slavonic it was a numeral
‘two’ with a definiteness presupposition but no distributive
meaning. The findings suggest that the Proto-Indo-European determiner *ambho:, from which oba,
English both, German beide, etc.,
are derived, likely did not have a distributive component, and that the
distributive function of oba, both, beide, etc. was a later, parallel development in
the individual language subgroups. If this is indeed so, this suggests that
a change from ‘two’ to ‘both’ is a natural
development for grammars.
Finally,
we have studied the secondary imperfective in Old Church Slavonic and
suggested that it was not a viewpoint aspect marker, as commonly suggested for
its counterpart in the modern Slavic languages, but aktionsart
maker of atelicity (Łazorczyk
2007, 2008).
In addition to the theoretical
contributions, the project also aims to create the first morphologically
annotated, electronically available, chronological database of medieval
South Slavic texts. The corpus will facilitate the study of the historical
and comparative grammar of the Slavic languages by making data collection
faster and more accurate, by allowing grammatically-based searches, and by
making possible the application of quantitative methods to linguistic
analysis.
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Funding
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The project was funded by a grant from
the National
Science Foundation (BCS-0418581) on “The Historical
Syntax of Medieval South Slavic” for the period September 2004-August
2008.
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Participants
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Roumyana Pancheva
(Linguistics
and Slavic Languages and Literatures,
USC), Principal
Investigator
Agnieszka Łazorczyk (Linguistics, USC)
Jelena Krivokapic (Linguistics, USC)
Milena Gueorguieva
(Comparative
Literature, USC)
Zlatina Sandalska
(Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
Mila Nazyrova (Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
Yulia Minkova (Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
Nancy Louie (Linguistics,
USC)
Allison Pultz (Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
William Gunn (Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
Janine Kagle (Occidental College)
Inna Schmul (Slavic
Languages and Literatures, USC)
Programming
help by Stefano Vegnaduzzo is gratefully acknowledged.
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Pancheva,
R. (2009b). “Factors Contributing to Historical Change in the
Linearization of T in Old Church Slavonic”. Invited talk at the panel
on Formal Approaches to Slavic Diachrony
at the meeting of the British
Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Cambridge,
UK, March 28-30, 2009.
Pancheva, R.
(2008). “Head-Directionality of TP in Old Church Slavonic” In
A. Antonenko, J. Bailyn,
and C. Bethin (eds.) Formal
Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting, 2007.
Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor. 313-332.
Łazorczyk,
A. and R. Pancheva. (2009). “From “Two” to “Both”:
Historical Changes in the Syntax and Meaning of Oba in
Slavic” In R.P. Leow,
H. Campos, D. Lardiere (eds.) Little
Words: Their History, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and
Acquisition. Georgetown
University Press.
Łazorczyk,
A. (2008). “Secondary Imperfective as Atelicizer
in Old Church Slavonic and Modern Bulgarian” LSA, Chicago, January
2008.
Łazorczyk,
A. (2007). “Secondary Imperfective in Old Church Slavonic and Modern
Bulgarian” Proceedings of the Fourth Graduate Colloquium on Slavic
Linguistics, Ohio Slavic Papers.
Łazorczyk,
A. and R. Pancheva. (2005). “Historical
Changes in the Syntax and Meaning of Oba ‘Two/Both’ in
Slavic” 17th International Conference on Historical
Linguistics, University of Wisconsin – Madison, July 31-Aug 5,
2005.
Pancheva, R.
(2006). “The Position of Tense in the Old Church Slavonic
Clause” Inaugural conference of the Slavic Linguistics Society, Indiana
University, September 8-10, 2006.
Pancheva, R. (2005). “The Rise
and Fall of Second-Position Clitics”, Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 23 (1), 103-167.
Pancheva, R. (2004). “Balkan
Possessive Clitics: The Problem of Case and
Category”, In O. M. Tomić (ed.). Balkan
Syntax and Semantics. John Benjamins.
175-219.
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