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Language Contact in the Balkan Sprachbund a Study Of Language Contact in the Balkan Sprachbund A study of transparency in Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek Abstract When communicating speakers map meaning onto form. It would thus seem obvious for languages to show a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form, but this is often not the case. This perfect mapping, i.e. transparency, is indeed continuously violated in natural languages, giving rise to zero-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one opaque correspondences between meaning and form. However, transparency is a mutating feature, which can be influenced by language contact. In this scenario languages tend to evolve and lose some of their opaque features, becoming more transparent. This study investigates transparency in a very specific contact situation, the Balkan Sprachbund (BS), by researching five different languages: Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek. We considered two separate theories: convergence and diglossia. Following the first theory we hypothesized that convergence is the cause behind the feature sharing typical of the BS, thus predicting that Bulgarian and Romanian would be more transparent than the other two languages of the same families not belonging to the BS, Russian and Italian. Our second hypothesis, on the contrary, considered Greek to be the source language behind the existence of the BS and therefore predicting that the BS languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, would share the same features. We investigated twenty-five opacity features, divided into five categories, Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning is 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 prove our second hypothesis to be borne out. Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek present the same features, which points into the direction of diglossia as the underlying cause of the BS. Keywords: transparency, FDG, language contact, Balkan Sprachbund, diglossia 1. Introduction The function of human languages is first and foremost communication. And, in order to achieve this goal, language users must constantly transform meaning into form and form into meaning. This leads to a tight relation between two separate levels of linguistic organization: a content level and a formal level. It would, therefore, be normal to expect a perfect and transparent one-to-one correspondence between these two levels, namely the existence of one 1 form for every meaning and vice versa. This is however not the case. To our knowledge, no perfectly transparent language exists. All languages allow to some degree discontinuity, fusion and redundancies, to mention a few ways in which transparency can be violated. This introductory chapter will outline in detail the concept of transparency, comparing it to other linguistic notions such as simplicity, ease of acquisition, iconicity and regularity (1.1) and its relation to language contact (1.2). 1.1 Transparency The term transparency has been interpreted in various ways over the years. For the sake of this research, we will adopt Hengeveld’s (2011) definition, according to which transparency in a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form. It is nonetheless important to outline other concepts with which transparency can easily be confused: simplicity, ease of acquisition, iconicity and regularity. Within simplicity, we can make a distinction between absolute and relative simplicity. Absolute simplicity is the simplicity of a language system as such and can be calculated by looking at the amount of surface form (surface simplicity) a language has and at the levels of embedding (structural simplicity), it needs it order to communicate a certain content (Miestamo, 2006). In these respects, the more linguistic material and layers of embedding a language needs, the more complex it is. Relative simplicity is also known as ease of acquisition. According to Miestamo (2006) and Kusters (2003), the easier it is for L2 learners to learn a language, the simpler that language must be. The term iconicity, on the other hand, refers to the predictability of a word’s meaning from its form (McWorther, 1998). In spoken languages, however, the relation between word meaning and form is much more arbitrary (Leufkens, 2013). Finally, another notion which is often confused with transparency is regularity. Regularity can refer to the predictability of paradigms, such as verbal conjugations and nominal declensions for instance, as well as to the formation of compounds (Leufkens, 2013). Yet, predictability of paradigms does not mean transparency. All these notions have something in common with transparency as defined by Hengeveld (2011), but differ conceptually from the latter. Transparency is, in fact, an interface property between the conceptual and the formal levels, and not an intrinsic property of the language itself. 1.2. Transparency in language contact 2 As any other language property, transparency is dynamic and hence subject to influences and changes. The most interesting evolutions are witnessed in situations of isolation and in those of language contact. In the absence of language contact, languages evolve in one specific direction, namely from simple to complex (Lupyan & Dale, 2010) and from transparent to opaque (Hengeveld, 2011b; Seuren & Wekker, 1986). In such a context, certain formal units can change or lose their meaning completely and thus become opaque by undergoing a process also known as ‘maturation phenomenon’ (Dahl, 2004). Nominal expletives are the ultimate example of such a phenomenon. Often defined as ‘historical junk’ and ‘male nipples’ (Lass, 1997), they had a semantic meaning which was lost over time making the way to an empty and opaque placeholder. Just like isolation causes a language to become more opaque, language contact, on the contrary, may push it towards transparency. This shift might be due to a competition between different factors, such as economy and transparency. In contact situations, the need for intelligibility is extremely high, which in turn forces speakers to choose more transparent forms. As demonstrated by Kusters (2003), the more L2 learners a language has, the more transparent it becomes over time. Similar results are found by Olthof (2015) for Norwegian and Leufkens (2013) and Seguin (2015) for creole languages. Creole languages are exemplary in this respect, as they originate in very peculiar contact situations between much older languages. The results of both Leufkens (2013) and Seguin (2015) clearly show that creoles are significantly more transparent than their source languages. The evolution of a language towards opacity or transparency is not random. Based on a transparency study of four natural languages, Hengeveld (2011b) shows that opaque features are not randomly distributed across languages but that the existence of certain features imply the existence of others, forming an implicational hierarchy. The latter can often be interpreted as a diachronic pathway (Greenberg, 1978). It thus follows that languages start out relatively transparent, acquiring over time opaque features following the order of the implicational hierarchy. This is in agreement with the finding of several typological studies, such as Leufkens (2013 & 2015), Olthof (2015) and Seguin (2015). After investigating 25 languages, Leufkens (2015) drew up an implicational hierarchy mirroring the diachronic changes in (1). This hierarchy is implicational in the sense that the existence in a language of a certain feature implies the existence of all features lower in this hierarchy. 3 (1) nominal expletives, clausal agreement → grammatical gender, tense copying → suppletion → phrasal agreement, irregular stem formation → predominant head-marking → morphophonologically conditioned stem alternation → morphologically and morphophonologically conditioned affix alternation → redundant referential marking, phonologically conditioned stem and affix alternation, grammatical relations Every contact situation is different, just like every language born in such a context is unique. In the present study, we focus on one particular contact situation: the Balkan Sprachbund. The following chapter will introduce the features of this special linguistic league and outline its implications for this research. 2. The Balkan Sprachbund A sprachbund is “understood as two or more geographically contiguous and genealogically different languages sharing grammatical and lexical developments that result from language contact rather than a common ancestral source” (Friedman, 2006). The Balkan Sprachbund is a linguistic league of languages from the Balkan area. These languages are genealogically far from one another and yet share peculiar features only present within the league, which are believed to have developed thanks to constant contact. This chapter will introduce the 4 geography and history of the Balkans, the languages involved and their features and finally the theories behind the birth of the Balkan Sprachbund. 2.1. The Balkans and their history The Balkans can be geographically defined quite easily. They are bordered by the Ionian, Mediterranean and Aegean Seas on the south, by the Adriatic Sea on the west and the Black Sea on the east. The Sava river and the Danube define its northern borders (Tomić, 2006). Politically speaking, on the other hand, with the term Balkans one usually refers to Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, “European” Turkey and the countries formerly known
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