Brian D Joseph, Publications
Is Balkan Comparative Syntax Possible?
[Version of August 28, 1998]
NOTE: accents, diacritics, and special symbols have been
eliminated or modified in the interest of making the text readable in the
absence of the appropriate encoding system and font. Thus, long marks and
the like are not indicated, and so cited forms should be used with caution.
1. Preliminaries
The question asked in the title to this
paper might seem to have a self-evident answer, especially when viewed in the
context of the other papers in this volume, all of which deal with some aspect
of the syntax of two or more languages of the Balkans. However, it is not as
irrelevant or trivial a question as it might at first seem, for despite the
successes of these studies, and others to be cited below, with regard to taking
a comparative perspective on the various languages in the Balkans, the logically
prior question of whether it is in fact possible or even enlightening to do
comparative Balkan syntax needs to be explored, as the discussion below indicates.
As a starting point, consider the following
succinct statement of the goal of Universal Grammar: the determination of the ways
in which all languages are alike and the ways in which they differ.1 To that end,
comparative syntax plays an important and even crucial role.
To illustrate the power of such an approach,
one need only look at what has been accomplished regarding the pro-Drop
(or "Null Subject") parameter, to choose one area that has been heavily
investigated.2
Taking a comparative perspective on pro-Drop - the possibility some languages
show of omitting overt expression of unemphatic subject pronouns in tensed clauses
- has suggested various correlations to be found between the possibility of such
omitted ("null") subjects and the occurrence of other syntactic and morphosyntactic
phenomena. For example, the occurrence of overt subjects in expletive constructions
such as those involving weather-verbs or extraposition has been shown (Lightfoot
1991) to correlate with a language not allowing pro-Drop, as in English or
French, and the absence of such subjects with a language allowing pro-Drop,
as in Spanish. Similarly, Jaeggli & Safir (1989b:29-30) define "morphological
uniformity" in verbal paradigms in terms of the structure of verb forms - a
"uniform" paradigm being one in which forms are either all stem + affix or all
bare stem, but not mixed with bare-stem and some stem + affix - and suggest
further that "null subjects are permitted in all and only languages with
morphologically uniform inflectional paradigms."
Clearly, if only one language were looked
at, it would be harder to be sure that any property that was identified as
correlating with the possibility or impossibility of pro-Drop was a
significant one; thus comparison, and especially cross-linguistic comparison,
is at the heart of the enterprise of universal grammar. Correlations such as
these for pro-Drop may indeed be wrong; for instance, the notion of
morphological uniformity that Jaeggli & Safir promote seems to be of dubious
value,3 and the very definition of a "pro-Drop language" is far from
clear-cut, as argued elsewhere (e.g. Joseph 1994), especially in the face of
sentences from English, a putative non-pro-Drop language, in which
initial material, including subjects, can be deleted,4 and of the construction-
specific reversal of the usual pro-Drop setting in French and
Greek.5
Still, without comparative syntactic methodology, no one would be in the position
to evaluate such claims and correlations.
Examining the nature of null subjects is an
example of doing comparative syntax by focusing on a particular construction or
syntactic feature. Yet, there are other ways of focusing this enterprise, including
looking at genetically related languages - the basis for comparative syntax in the
traditional sense, e.g. as practiced by Wackernagel 1892 in his classic study of an
aspect of Indo-European word-order patterns - or a combination of the genetic and
construction-specific approach, as with studies of clitics in Romance languages
(e.g. by Kayne 1991, and others) or Verb-Second phenomena in Germanic (e.g.
by Weerman 1989, the authors represented in Haider & Prinzhorn 1986, among others).
6
Yet another basis for the comparison of
languages has been areal, comparing languages that are geographically related,
and much interesting work has been done in the comparative syntax of the languages
of the Balkans. Under this rubric would be works examining, for example, from
various perspectives within Generative Grammar, the structure of verb phrase
and the domain of Verb Movement (Rivero 1990, 1994), the properties of subjunctive
clauses and modal inflection vis-a-vis control phenomena and clitic-climbing
(Terzi 1992), the realization of Tough-Movement constructions in languages with
finite subordinate clauses (Joseph 1980, 1983), and multiple WH-Questions (Rudin
1988), but also the uncovering, within a more traditional descriptive framework,
of numerous shared morphosyntactic and syntactic features such as the structure
of the future tense, a postposed definite article, the pleonastic use of weak
pronominal forms as verbal markers, and the general absence of nonfinite
complementation, all presented by Sandfeld in his classic work (Sandfeld 1930)
on the Balkan languages and discussed, along with others, in the enormous
literature on Balkan linguistics.7
While the results of areally based
comparative syntactic investigations have often served to shed light on aspects
of Universal Grammar, an areal perspective has been especially interesting
when the languages in question show other common characteristics that unite them,
that is, when they show traits linking them as a "Sprachbund," to use the German
designation as a technical term in English.8 A Sprachbund is an area where long-
term intense and intimate contact among speakers of several different languages
has led to massive structural convergence in languages that were once quite
different from one another.9 The languages of the Balkans constitute perhaps
the best-known and most deeply investigated case, but other examples include South
Asia (Masica 1976), and Meso-America (Campbell, Kaufman, & Smith-Stark 1986).
Among the syntactic characteristics of these other SprachbŸnde are for South Asia,
the use of conjunctive participles for serialization, SOV word order, and dative
subject constructions, and for Meso-America, the occurrence of nominal possession
of the type his-dog the-man), the absence of switch reference marking,
and non-verb-final word order (vs. SOV languages in surrounding
areas).10
Still, some of these results, especially
those from the generatively-based investigations mentioned above, may well pose
some problems when viewed from the Sprachbund perspective, since Sprachbund
phenomena generally are attributed to language contact in some form. The exact
nature of the contact that leads to a Sprachbund is often a matter of some
controversy, in that there is debate as to whether it is substrate influence
from one population shifting to a target language, superstratal influence of one
language over the others in the area, massive bi- or multi-lingualism often of
an imperfect sort, sociolinguistic accommodation, or some combination of such
situations, that has led to the convergence in the Sprachbund. Nonetheless,
contact in some form is invariably responsible, and language contact would seem
to be more of an accidental happenstance in the history of particular languages
that could render comparative syntax less interesting than it might otherwise be.
It is valuable therefore to explore this
issue more deeply; accordingly, in what follows, four ways in which the results
of some types of comparative syntactic investigations are potentially problematic
are discussed in some detail, with an eye towards determining whether the enterprise
of comparative Balkan syntax is possible and if so, what the limits are that it
is subject to. With those issues addressed, some specific case-studies involving
negation in the Balkans are discussed, in order to illustrate what different
approaches to comparative Balkan syntax might yield in the way of insights.
2. Some Problematic Aspects of Comparative Syntax in the Balkans
First, it seems fair to ask whether
the results that have been obtained from recent generative comparisons of
the syntax of various Balkan languages are revealing beyond what might be
found if one were to compare any arbitrary set of typologically related languages
chosen on a basis other than geography. That is to say, especially when one
realizes the role that language contact has played in shaping the Balkan languages,
in what way does a claim about parallels in the structure of the clause among the
Balkan languages advance our knowledge? For instance, the analysis given by Rivero
1994 for Verb Movement in the Balkans, which proposes the structure in (1) for
the "Balkan clause":
is interesting and well-argued in its own right, but what does it show?
In particular, it seems not point to a uniquely Balkan clause-structure,
but rather merely extends to these languages analytic principles - in this case,
the "exploded INFL" analysis given by Pollock 1989 for clause structure -
which are assumed to be part of Universal Grammar. In that case, however,
such an analysis seems to call into question any special value that might be
posited for Balkan syntactic parallels. That is to say, if the analysis
assimilates Balkan verb structures to well-known universal principles, then
this is really a matter of comparative syntax more generally, not comparative
Balkan syntax in particular. Moreover, given that the Sprachbund effect is a
matter of some type of language contact, one can legitimately wonder if any of
the results obtained by such an analysis are ones that provide insights into
the Balkan Sprachbund as a contact-induced phenomenon.
Such criticisms are to be leveled not
just at relatively recent work of this type. The same could be said of the
results reported in Joseph (1980; 1983: 232ff.), for instance, where a possible
parallel was identified between Greek and Romanian in the realization of Tough-
Movement in a language without an infinitive. As indicated in (2), it was claimed
that in each of these languages, as the earlier infinitive was replaced by finite
subordinate clauses, constructions developed which avoided having an transitive
complement verb which is both finite and objectless; this was achieved in Greek
through a copying-type of Tough Movement, as in (2a), in which a pronominal object
in the subordinate clause copying the "raised" nominal renders the transitive verb
non-objectless, and in Romanian by a "passive"-type of Tough Movement, as in (2b),
in which the subordinate clause is passivized through the reflexive passive
construction and is thus detransitivized:
(2) a.
ta anglikai |
ine |
diskola |
na |
the-English/NTR.NOM.PL |
are/3PL |
difficult/NTR.NOM.PL |
SUBJUNC |
tai |
katalavi |
kanis |
them/NTR.ACC.PL |
understand/3SG |
someone/NOM.SG |
'English is difficult to understand' (literally = "the-English
(things) are difficult that someone understand them") |
b.
asta nu-i |
greu sa |
se |
faca |
this not is/3SG |
hard SUBJUNC |
REFL |
do/3SG |
'This is not hard to do' (literally = "This is not hard that it be done") |
Still, even if of interest, the parallel seen here is a rather abstract
and "deep" one. Moreover, it cannot be a matter of language contact since
the form of the construction in each language is quite different, involving
what can descriptively be called "copying" in Greek but a reflexive/passive
formation in Romanian. Rather, the parallel seems to have to do with a universal
tendency in Tough-Movement constructions, whether the result of a syntactic rule
or outcome of other rules, to "prefer" or select a nonfinite complement, as
reflected in the prevalence of nonfinite subordinate clauses cross-linguistically
in Tough-Movement sentences. Thus if due in large part to some aspect of Universal
Grammar, however the cross-linguistic tendency is to be captured formally, the
parallel is not very interesting from a Balkanological point of view, though it
does provide additional input into the universal characterization of Tough Movement.
Such examples therefore do tell us something,
but they do not reveal anything about Balkan-particular characteristics, or at
least not in the same way as does finding parallel structures such as those noted
above in section 1. That is, it has been taken to be quite significant with regard
to their common development that many languages in the Balkans exhibit a future
tense with an invariant prefix-like marker based - historically at least - on a
verb meaning 'want', as in (3a), a definite article that is postposed within the
noun phrase, as in (3b), the use of pleonastic weak personal pronouns coindexing
object noun phrases and thus serving roughly as object agreement markers or
transitivity markers on the verb, as in (3c), and finite (i.e. person-marked,
tensed) subordinate clauses where English and many other European languages, at
least, use nonfinite complementation, as in (3d), to take four widespread and
commonly noted Balkan features:11
(3) a. Alb do (te) punoj = Blg shte rabotja = Grk tha dulevo
(< earlier the (na) dulevo) = Rmn o sa lucrez 'I will work'
(historically,
"wants-(that)-I-work")
b. Alb ujk-u = Blg vulk-ut
= Rmn lup-ul 'the wolf' (literally, "wolf-the")
c. Alb e pashe Gjonin
= Blg go gledax Ivan = Grk ton ida ton jani = Rmn l'am vazut
pe Ion 'I saw John' (literally, "him I-saw (the-)John")
d. Alb perpiqem te ndihmoj
= Blg opitvam se da pomogna = Grk prospaqo na voiqiso
= Rmn incerc sa ajut 'I try to help' (literally, "I-try that I-help")
Given the fact that these parallels are not the result of a common inheritance
from Proto-Indo-European,12 and that they represent a divergence from earlier
stages of each of these languages, the convergence they show is striking and
provides an important starting point for an investigation into the language
contact situation that gave rise to them. Such, however, is not the case with
parallels that can be attributed to the workings of Universal Grammar.
Second, as some of the features
discussed here already show, the syntactic similarities found in Sprachbuende and other
contact situations tend to be superficial in nature, and are really a matter
of a convergence in surface structure, rather than in deep structure or a set
of rules by which underlying forms are realized on the surface. The Balkan
features illustrated in (3), for instance, can all be readily described in terms
of gross surface patterns, what may be characterized as "target structures" that
speakers aim at, and such is the case also with the convergent verb serialization
structures which, as noted above, are found in many South Asian languages, with
convergent word order patterns such as the South Asian OV structures or the
Meso-American non-verb-final order, and with the his-dog the-man expression
of possession in Meso-America, where the target structure is a desired output.
Similarly, in the on-going contact situation in Kupwar village of the Maharashtra
state in India involving Kannada, Marathi, and Urdu speakers, as described by
Gumperz & Wilson 1971, among the convergences is the Kupwar Kannada use of 'be'
after predicate adjectives, paralleling the Marathi/Urdu surface pattern and
diverging from the Standard Kannada absence of 'be' in that context.
Languages in such situations may show
"deeper" similarities or even differences in the ways these surface forms are
generated synchronically or more generally are integrated into the grammars of
individual languages, but the surface forms themselves, the output of generative
rules of syntax, would seem to be the critical level at which to judge similarities
that would reveal the existence of a Sprachbund. For instance, it would not matter
what the processes are in individual languages that lead to basic verb-final order
in South Asia, e.g. whether it is an underlying SOV order, or an obligatory
object-fronting process from an underlying SVO order, or whatever - as long as
the surface similarity is there, the phenomenon will be salient for linguists,
and presumably, and more importantly, will be so for the speakers, too.
Alternatively, if the processes by which verb-final order is generated in a
language are so constrained by universal grammar that there is really just one
possibility and no other options, then all that matters is the presence of the
target structure in the language output, not the processes that give rise to it.
In such a case, Universal Grammar would be responsible for the deep similarity,
and it would thus be uninteresting from the Sprachbund perspective of language
contact.
Within the Balkans, this situation can be
illustrated by the convergence involving perfect-tense formations with the
verb 'have', where a superficial similarity has long been noted13 between
Albanian and Macedonian regarding the fact that they both have a past perfect
consisting of the past tense of 'have' with a (generally passive)14 participle,
and Greek can be added to this as well,15 e.g. Alb kisha lidhure 'I had tied',
Grk ixa demeno 'I had tied',16 Mac imav storeno 'I had made'.
However, as Friedman 1983 remarks: "[although] the superficial resemblance
between the Macedonian and Albanian forms has been noted at least since Sandfeld,
... these forms play very different roles in the structure of their respective
languages," especially in terms of the relationship to other verb tenses and
formations in each language. Thus there are deeper differences in how these forms
are embedded in their respective verbal systems, yet such differences are irrelevant
to the similarity these forms show in terms of surface structure.
Such an importance on surface structures
is really to be expected if the basis for the spread of such features - that is,
the basis for the development of contact-induced areal convergences - is at
least limited bilingualism, transfer, and reverse interference, for surface
forms are the point of contact between speakers. It should also be noted, in
this regard, that lexical borrowing, which is a quintessentially surface-oriented
phenomenon that is widespread in the Balkans, can easily shade off into construction
borrowing and thus into the realm of syntax. This point can be illustrated by the
Greek construction exemplified in (4a) consisting of repetitions of a perfective
verb form sandwiched around the morpheme for 'not' but with the meaning 'whether
one VERBs or not', for this construction, as noted by Banfi (1985:80), occurs
with the verb 'want' in several Balkan languages, as in (4b), the form being
third person plural in Albanian and the Turkish negation following the usual
suffixal pattern for the language:17
(4) a. Grk fiji de fiji 'whether one leaves or not'
b. Grk theli de theli
= Blg ste ne ste = Rmn vrea nu vrea 'whether one wants to or not'
~ Trk ister istemez 'willingly or not' (literally: "want-AORIST.3SG want- NEG.AORIST.3SG")
~ Alb donin s'donin 'whether they want to or not'
One interpretation of these facts that suggests itself, in the face of the mild productivity it shows in
Greek and the widespread occurrence of the 'want' formation, is that the 'want' construction is the
starting point which has spread via loan translation throughout the Balkans, but that this borrowing
has become the basis for extension to other verbs, with the result that it has become a syntactic pattern
rather just an isolated lexical form. In such a view, it is hard to distinguish something that is in essence
lexical borrowing of a phrase from the borrowing of what is in essence a syntactic pattern. A surface
borrowing can thus have repercussions into and throughout the syntax.
If similarities in contact situations are focused
on the surface, it therefore becomes potentially problematic to view the syntactic similarities among
Balkan languages in terms of deep syntactic features such as parameter settings, as Rudin 1988 did
for instance for parallels in multiple wh-Question constructions in Bulgarian and Romanian.
Sprachbund significance for such features would be inconsistent with their deep nature, since the
"action" in language contact, so to speak, is at the surface, not at a deep level, yet contact is crucial
for the development of a Sprachbund.
Third, and this is a problem that pervades
much of Balkan linguistics, most of the relevant studies18 have been based just
on a comparison of the modern standard languages, when in fact the crucial period for the
"Balkanization" of all the languages in the Balkan Sprachbund was some 400 to 700 years
ago and involved contact at the level of the regional dialects not the standard languages.
Instructive here is the observation made by Masica 1976 and seconded by Campbell et al.
1986 that some linguistic areas are "the relics of past contacts, no longer active and
others ... are in the process of formation and extension because of on-going interaction
and change" (Campbell et al., 533). Most of the features that make the Balkan Sprachbund
interesting are ones that are the result of past contacts, not on-going continuing contact
in the present day.
In a sense then, looking at an on-going contact
situation such as that mentioned above involving Urdu, Marathi, and Kannada speakers in Kupwar is
more crucial for understanding the Balkan Sprachbund than are constructs from modern syntactic theory.
Similarly, current contact within Greece involving standard Modern Greek interacting with Arvanitika,
the variety of Tosk Albanian spoken in Greece for some 600 years or more, or Aromanian, also known
as Vlach, the variety of Romanian spoken in Greece for at least several centuries, provide important
insights into the formation of the Balkan Sprachbund, for these typically village-based situations
approximate the contact situation in the Balkans 600 years or so ago in ways that an examination or
comparison of the various present-day, generally urban-based, standard languages cannot. What one
sees in examining the urban standards is perhaps the aftereffects of the contact from several centuries
ago, but it is not such a direct window on the conditions that gave rise to the Sprachbund effects.
As an example19 of insights from such relatively
recent contact in the Balkans, consider the following involving the assimilation of the interpretation
of the understood subject with the gerund in Arvanitika to the current Greek pattern for the present
active participle (or "gerund") in -ondas. In what is the result of an innovation that most
likely took place in late-ish Medieval Greek, given the fixing of the current form of the gerund in
that period,20 the Modern Greek -ondas form permits an interpretation of its understood subject as
coreferent only with a main-clause subject, as in (5):
(5)
o janisi |
ide |
ti mariaj |
perpatondasi/*j |
s to dromo |
the-John/NOM |
saw/3SG |
the-Mary/ACC |
walk/GERND |
on the-road |
'John saw Mary while he/*she was walking on the road' |
In Standard Albanian, however, based on the Tosk dialect, either subject or object control of
understood subject of a gerund, e.g. duke ecur '(while) walking', is possible, as indicated in (6):
(6) a.
Njeri i |
afrohej |
[Oi duke |
ecur] |
man/NOM.SG.INDEF |
approached/3SG.IMPF |
GERND |
walk/PPL |
'A man was approaching (while) (he was) walking' |
b.
Vajzai |
pa |
njerij |
[Oi/j duke |
ecur] |
girl/NOM.SG.DEF |
saw/3SG |
man/ACC.SG.INDEF |
GERND |
walk/PPL |
'The girl saw the man (while) (she/he was) walking.' |
In Arvanitika, on the other hand, even though also part of the Tosk dialect group, one finds only
subject control, as in Modern Greek. Therefore, influence from Greek on Arvanitika is likely, with
the pattern of interpretation for the gerund in Arvanitika influenced by the Greek pattern, based on
recognition by Arvanitika speakers that the Greek form and the Arvanitika form are parallel, to be
identified cross-linguistically as being the same type of grammatical element. Significantly, such an
identification is ultimately surface-based and is precisely the sort of development one expects to find
in intense contact situations where there is at least some bilingualism. Although it is not clear exactly
when the change in Arvanitika took place, it is most likely to be recent, once Arvanitika speakers
became increasingly bilingual in Arvanitika and Greek; indeed, such bilingualism is the norm in
virtually all Arvanitika communities nowadays, with the younger generation tending towards exclusive
use of Greek. Nonetheless, in the period of widespread bilingualism, these Arvanitika communities
mirrored aspects of the multilingual villages prevalent in the Balkans in centuries past, and thus provide
a window of sorts onto the conditions of the past.
Fourth, as the discussion of the 'have'-perfect
already demonstrates, much of what is attended to in Balkan linguistics is similarities among languages,
without as much attention being paid to the differences these languages show. This is more true of
traditional descriptive studies, perhaps, than more recent generative studies, for the latter generally
attempt to develop a typology according to which the languages under investigation can be said to fall
into one or the other class of languages. However interesting the differences might be, though, and
however important it might be to investigate them - for only by knowing the extent of differences
can we judge whether there really are significant similarities - the differences are not something that
arise by language contact and thus in a sense fall outside of the purview of at least traditional Balkan
linguistics.
These four issues loom large in any attempt
at comparative Balkan syntax, but they are not insurmountable. In what follows, a path towards
their resolution is charted.
3. Towards a Resolution
Once one takes all of these problems into consideration, it becomes clear that a Balkan comparative
syntax is indeed possible, but the success of the enterprise depends on what one's goals are.
For example, for the purposes of tying any results into the Sprachbund phenomenon so well
documented for the languages of the Balkans, the most enlightening comparisons will be those
involving surface phenomena which are likely to be transferred in language contact situations. On
the other hand, comparisons involving parametric variation or parallels at deeper levels of structure
are illuminating insofar as they shed light on Universal Grammar, for instance, or clarify the extent
of a superficial similarity, although they do not provide any input into an understanding of the contact
that created the Balkan Sprachbund.
What is most useful here as a means towards
a resolution is a distinction that draws on and is somewhat analogous to
Schaller's 1975 distinction
between "language of the Balkans," a purely geographic designation that takes in any language that
occurs within the geographic bounds of the Balkans, and "Balkan language," a designation for those
languages of the Balkans that participate in the Balkan Sprachbund and show parallels due to language
contact. Using that dichotomy as a basis, one can distinguish between working on the "comparative
syntax of the Balkan languages," i.e. examining the syntax of individual languages of the Balkans
in comparison with other languages of the Balkans and elsewhere, and doing "comparative Balkan
syntax," i.e. examining the syntax of Balkan languages, keeping the Sprachbund in mind. And,
more generally even, one can further distinguish "linguistics of the Balkans" from "Balkan linguistics,"
the former being the analysis of the languages in and of themselves, the latter being the analysis with
regard to Sprachbund.
The recognition of such a distinction means
that the different aims of comparative syntax can be clarified. Just as the "language of the Balkans"
versus "Balkan language" distinction is a useful one, so too are the ones proposed here for comparative
syntax and for studying the languages in the Balkans more generally - the goals of each enterprise
are different and thus success is measured in different ways.
With all this now in place, a discussion of
some facts concerning negation in the Balkans can be examined, as case studies where both types
of perspectives can fruitfully be taken.
4. Two Case Studies in Balkan Negation
4.1. The first area of interest starts with the formal parallels evident in one of the
negation markers in Greek and in Albanian, as well as most non-Vlax dialects of Romany (the
language of the Gypsies) spoken in the Balkans. In each of these languages, a negator beginning
with [m] is found for nonindicative negation, as well as some other functions discussed later on; the
forms in question are Modern Greek mi(n) (Ancient Greek [me]
< >), Albanian mos, and Romany ma.
There are clear cognate forms elsewhere in
Indo-European to these Balkan #m- negators, and the paths of development to the attested
forms are well-understood. In particular, Sanskrit ma, Avestan ma, and Armenian
mi all point to a Proto-Indo-European *me as the source for the Greek, Albanian, and
Romany forms, and Tocharian ma is generally taken to do so
also.21 Ancient Greek
me continues PIE *me directly, from which Modern Greek [mi] developed by regular
sound change; the final -n found in some forms of mi(n), especially those marking
verbal negation, was added to inherited mi by analogy to the finite verbal indicative negator
Den, which itself derives from Ancient Greek [ouden]
(< >) 'nothing; not at all'.
As for Albanian, mos derives from a composite *me-kwid ('not' + 'anything')
by regular sound change; sorre 'blackbird' from *kwersna, for example,
provides examples of the vowel development of *e to o, the assibilation of *kw to
s before a front vowel, and to a certain extent also the reduction of the final syllable needed
to derive mos. An Indo-European "pedigree" for present-day Balkan mi/mos/ma
guarantees that the Turkish general negation marker-me-/-ma- is not in any way responsible
for the occurrence of m-negators in these other Balkan languages, however unlikely such
a scenario might be in any case.
Due to a lack of sufficient information about
the range of uses of ma in Romany, attention hereafter is focused on the Greek and Albanian
m-negators. Similarly, even though a form [mi] occurs in the expression of a negative
imperative (i.e. a prohibition) in the Macedonian spoken in the area around Thessaloniki, at least
into the first half of the 20th century, this occurrence seems clearly to be a matter of the borrowing
of the Greek formation into Macedonian, as discussed most recently by Topolinjska (1995:310),
most likely through the medium of bilingual speakers, and thus is not of immediate concern here.
Besides the formal parallels, there are a
number of functional parallels between Modern Greek mi(n) and Albanian mos.
The various functions these elements fulfill are given in (7), and examples of these uses are
given in (8), with the two displays following the same order of presentation for these uses;
mi(n) and mos are glossed as miand mos respectively, and
some relevant explanatory details about various of the uses are included in
parentheses:22
(7) Functions of Balkan m-negators
- modal negator (in Grk, of subjunctive clauses; in Alb, of subjunctive and optative verbs)
- nonfinite negator (in Grk, of active participles; in Alb, of active participles (gerundives)
and the infinitival formation)
- introducer of prohibitives and negator of hortatives (in Grk, with finite verb forms, not
with imperatival forms per se; in Alb, with imperatives and hortatives)
- introducer of negatively evaluated clausal complements to verbs and nouns of fearing
(in Grk, on its own as complementizer or with another morpheme in mipos; in Alb,
with complementizer se (as se mos), though cf. (h) regarding another
interpretation of se mos)
- introducer of tentative main-clause questions (in Grk, with variant mipos)
- independent utterance expressing negative actions (i.e. prohibitions)
- negative combining-element in word-formation (in Grk, in isolated formations; in Alb,
more productively)
- pleonastic negator in clausal complements to heads with negative force (in Grk, e.g.
embodizo 'prevent'; in Alb, e.g., frike 'fear', thus overlapping somewhat with (d))
- negator of ellipted (i.e. "understood") elements
- negator of nonverbal lexical items and constituents (not in Alb, unless (g) belongs
here, or vice-versa)
(8) Examples of uses in (7) (i = Grk; ii = Alb)
i. bori |
na |
min |
exun |
kimithi |
can/3SG |
SUBJUNC |
mi |
have/3PL |
slept |
'It is possible that they
haven't gone to bed yet'
(lit., "It can that they have not slept") |
ii. sikur |
te |
mos |
jete |
bujku |
usta |
if |
SUBJUNC |
mos |
be/3SG.SUBJ |
farmer/NOM.DEF |
craftsman |
'if the farmer were not a craftsman' |
i. min |
exondas |
idea |
ja |
ola afta, |
o janis |
tin |
pandreftike |
mi |
have/ACT.PPL |
idea/ACC |
about |
all-these |
the-John/NOM |
her/ACC |
married/3SG |
'Not having any idea about all these things, John married her' (Veloudis 1982:22) |
ii. per te |
mos |
e |
marre |
/ duke |
mos |
marre |
asgje |
INFINITIVAL |
mos |
him |
take/PPL |
/ GRDV |
mos |
take/PPL |
anything |
'in order not to take him' |
/ '(while) not taking anything' |
i. min |
to |
petaksis! |
mi |
it/ACC |
throw/2SG |
'Don't throw it out!'
|
ii. mos |
u |
beni |
merak> |
mos |
NONACT |
make/2PL |
care |
'Don't worry!' |
i. to |
eskase |
apo |
fovo |
min |
ton |
xtipisun |
it/ACC |
burst/3SG |
from |
fear/ACC |
mi |
him/ACC |
beat/3PL |
'He ran off for fear that they might beat him'(Mackridge 1985:300) |
ii. kam |
frike |
se |
mos |
na |
shaje |
have/1SG |
fear |
that |
mos |
us/ACC |
scold/3SG |
'I fear lest he scold us'
|
i. min |
ides |
to pedi? |
mi |
saw/2SG |
the-child/ACC |
'Did you perhaps (happen to) see the child?' |
ii. mos |
e |
njihni |
ate? |
mos |
him |
know/2PL |
him/ACC |
'Do you (perhaps) know him?' |
i. mi!(NB: *min! (with final -n))
|
'Don't!' |
i. mite 'not even; neither' (cf. ute 'not even; neither' for segmentability);
miden 'nought; zero' (cf. the finite indicative negator den); mide 'not even;
neither' (infrequent; cf. ude 'not even; neither'); mipos (variant of mi(n)
in main-clause tentative questions and with complements to verbs and nouns of fearing, and cf.
complementizer pos 'that'); miyar(is) 'perhaps' (in tentative questions;
rather infrequent - note that miyaris also occurs, even more
rarely) |
ii. mosbarazi 'inequality' (cf. barazi 'equality'); mos
besim 'mistrust' (cf. besoj 'I trust'); mosnjohje 'ignorance' (cf. njoh
'I know'); mosqeni 'nonexistence' (cf. qeni 'being'),
etc. |
i'. fovame |
na |
min |
erthi |
(Veloudis 1982:11) |
fear/1SG |
SUBJUNC |
mi |
come/3SG |
'I am afraid that he may come' (NB: 'I am afraid he may not come') |
i". de> |
se |
embodizo |
na |
min |
milas |
(Thumb 1964:200) |
NEG |
you/ACC |
prevent/1SG |
SUBJUNC |
mi |
speak/2SG |
|
'I do not prevent you
from speaking' (NB:
'I do not prevent you from not speaking') |
ii. kam |
frike |
se |
mos |
na |
shaje |
have/1SG |
fear |
that |
mos |
us/ACC |
scold/3SG |
'I fear lest he scold us' |
i.' parkarizmena |
ke |
mi |
aftokinita |
itan |
pandu |
parked/NTR.PL |
and |
mi |
automobiles/NTR |
were |
everywhere |
'Parked and unparked
cars (i.e. 'cars that are parked and (ones that are)
not (parked)') were everywhere' (based on Mackridge 1985:244) |
i." mi |
ta xerja |
su |
ekso |
mi |
the-hands/ACC |
your |
outside |
'Don't (put) your hands
out!' (Mackridge 1985:244) |
i."' mi |
xirotera |
mi |
worse/NTR>PL>COMPVE |
'What next? God forbid!'
(literally: "(May) not worse (happen)!") |
ii. si |
mos |
me |
keq |
how |
mos |
COMPVE |
bad |
'in a lamentable
state'
(literally: "how (might) not worse (happen)?") |
i.' se |
periptosi |
mi |
plirom’s |
tis epitajis |
in |
case/ACC |
mi |
payment/GEN |
the-check/GEN |
'... in (the) case of nonpayment of the check' |
i." i |
mi |
kapnistes |
kathonde |
edo |
the |
mi |
smokers/NOM |
sit/3PL |
here |
'Non-smokers sit here' |
ii. NO EXAMPLES (UNLESS SOME OF (g) BELONGS HERE) |
The lists and examples in (7) and (8)
show that there are some rather striking parallels between Greek and Albanian with regard to the
use of their respective m-negators. In fact, only the last, constituent negation, is found just in
Greek, and otherwise the overlap is considerable. Still, there are some differences as well to note
in their use, beyond any signaled in the parenthetical notes in (7).
For one thing, as a word-formative element,
the m-negators show differences in productivity. In particular, the mite type formation
is rather limited in Greek, but mos- is a fairly productive derivational element in Albanian,
especially with deverbal nouns in -im. If, however, mos- in this function is paralleled
actually by mi as a constituent negator, as in (7/8j), e.g. mi pliromi
'nonpayment', mi kapnistis 'nonsmoker', then both are fairly productive, and
Albanian would then have the full range of uses found in Greek.
Second, Albanian mos is used
for negation in conditionals, e.g. ne mos gaboj'if I am not mistaken', while
Greek now uses the finite indicative negator den in such constructions, e.g.
an den se pistepso 'if I don't believe you'. For Greek, this use of den
is found for at least (20th century) demotic Greek - the situation in Ancient Greek and in at least
early 20th century katharevousa Greek was different,23 with conditional clauses negated with
the m-negator. The causes for the change to use of the indicative negator in conditionals
in Greek may be tied up with the development of moods, and thus is tangential to the matters at
hand here, but in terms of what to compare between Greek and Albanian, this change means that
care must be taken. Similarly, with regard to verbal moods used with the m-negators,
in prohibitives (cf. (7/8c)), Albanian mos is used with imperative mood forms, while Greek
mi(n) is used with nonimperative forms; given this distribution, the Albanian prohibitive
usage could be taken simply to be a case of nonindicative negation, as in (7/8a), while Greek
shows a special usage that does not reduce to nonindicative negation, inasmuch as mi(n)
cannot be used with the imperative. Moreover, following up on prohibitive uses, it should be noted
that independent mos, besides the prohibitive value it has (cf. (7/8f)) which is paralleled
in Greek, can also have nonprohibitive exclamatory value, as in (9), while in Greek independent
mi has only prohibitive value:
(9)
Eshte |
vrare |
Kajoja! |
- Mos! |
is/3SG |
slain/PPL |
Kajo/NOM.DEF |
mos |
'Kajo has been slain! OH NO!' |
Finally, the question-particle use in
(7/8e) is broader for Albanian mos than for Greek mi(n). In particular, mos
can have overt negative dubitative value while mi(n) is only dubitative (and thus at best
only weakly negative).
(10)
Mos |
eshte |
e forte |
mos |
is/3SG |
strong/FEM |
'She isn't strong, is she?' |
The approach taken here in the presentation
of these similarities and differences has primarily been of a pretheoretical, somewhat descriptive
and informal sort. Still, these facts are of some interest in regard to formal and comparative issues.
For instance, they raise interesting questions concerning the extent to which these functions are all
really separate or instead can be collapsed, e.g. does the question usage in (7/8e) involve some
negative force, especially for Greek, in the same way that the modal negation does? Also, are the
m-elements that are employed here are all the same formal element in some relevant sense?
It is noteworthy in this regard that in Greek some instantiations, particularly those attached to verbs,
allow a final -n before vowels and some consonants,24 as the examples in (8a-e)) show,
while some, e.g. the independent prohibitive utterance (8f), prohibit it, and so forth. Ultimately,
a theory of morphology and indeed even a semantic theory should have something to say about
such questions,25 but they are relevant too for issues in the formal syntax of these languages.
The independent word status of the
prohibitive utterance in (8f), for instance, has been taken by Rivero & Terzi 1994 as part of the
evidence for treating negation in Greek as formally distinct from clitic pronouns in terms of their
blocking properties in Verb Movement to Comp. There are indeed such differences that permit
such an interpretation, and further there is good evidence that the clitic pronouns of Greek are best
analyzed as affixes, as morphological entities and not syntactic ones (as argued in Joseph 1988, 1990).
Still, if the independent prohibitive utterance is a distinct element from the verbal negator, as their
differential behavior regarding final -n could suggest, then part of the evidence for treating
negation in the verb phrase as having special properties distinct from the so-called clitic pronouns
evaporates. Albanian would be more amenable to such an argument, since there are no formal
differences between the independent prohibitive utterance mos and the verbal negator.
Returning to the matter of the potential
Balkanological import of these comparisons made between Greek and Albanian with regard to
their m-negators, crucial to any insights here is consideration of the historical development
of these various functions in these languages. The following observations are critical in the evaluation
of these facts.
First, all of the functions in (7) for mi(n)
are found in Ancient Greek for me except for (7f): in the entirety of the Ancient Greek corpus,
there are no instances of the independent usage of me expressing negative actions, i.e. as
prohibitions, except in ellipsis where it occurs with other words, as in (7i); an example of the elliptical
prohibitive is given in (11):
(11)
me |
moi |
su |
(Euripides Medea 964) |
me |
me/DAT |
you/NOM |
|
'None of that to /for me!' (literally: "Not to-me you"
(with an understood 2SG verb such as 'give' or 'do')) |
Moreover, there are parallels elsewhere in Indo-European to most of the other functions, except
again the independent prohibitive utterance usage, though the non-prohibitive exclamatory value
of the independent negative utterance has a parallel in Sanskrit,26 the tentative question usage, and
the use with complements of fearing. Given that Ancient Greek had both the question usage and
the "fear"-complement usage and that there are numerous uncertainties about the prehistory of
Albanian, it is tempting to think of these Greek-Albanian parallels as innovations that spread from
Greek to Albanian, but such a spread would have occurred, if at all, in an early, pre-Balkanizing,
period of contact between the languages. Alternatively, the occurrence of both the question usage
and the "fear"-complement usage in Ancient Greek and Albanian could be taken to warrant positing
these as inheritances from Proto-Indo-European, even if they are not found elsewhere in the Indo-
European family.
What all this means is that of the various
uses without solid comparative justification as inheritances from Proto-Indo-European, the independent
prohibitive utterance use (7f) has the best chance of being a real Balkan innovation, since it clearly
must have arisen in Greek after Ancient Greek. It may well have come about as an extension of
the elliptical use understood as a prohibition, as in (7/8i), though it is not clear whether it spread
from Greek to Albanian or vice-versa or was an independent creation in each language.
It is important to note, however, that this is
exactly the sort of word that one might suppose would be very frequent in everyday contact situations,
so that it is a good candidate to have spread in the intense contact and (often imperfect) bilingualism
that gave rise to the Balkan Sprachbund. A speaker of one of these languages, when confronted
with a parallelism between their mi and another's mos (or vice-versa) could easily
have noted a difference in the extent of usage of the form in the other language and could have used
that as the model for extending their use of their own native element. As a calque, then, a sort of
loan-translation, it would have been transmitted superficially, but could be integrated into the receiving
language in a way different from the way it fits into the syntactic structure of the model language.
Thus, what would be most salient from the point of view of the speakers who are in contact with
one another would be the function that particular surface forms have, for that is where the model
for the calque and extension would be found.
In such a case, therefore, working out the
formal and sometimes abstract details of where each element fits in its respective system is certainly
important, but more for the syntax of the individual languages, for comparative syntax of the Balkan
languages; the comparative Balkan aspect, in terms of what is revealed for the Balkan Sprachbund,
that is, for comparative Balkan syntax, focuses more on the surface and on the function. Nevertheless,
tracing the history of the forms and their respective functions in each language highlights a possible
Sprachbund feature,27 the independent prohibitive use of an m-negator, thus contributing
to the goal of comparative Balkan syntax in the sense developed above. Even if it should turn out
that this usage arose independently in each language, so that it is not a contact-induced feature in
one of the languages, the identification of a possible shared feature through comparative syntax is
crucial to determining the extent to which the feature is a syntactic Balkanism, an aim of a true
comparative Balkan syntax.
4.2.Another set of negation facts to be considered here is more of the other sort,
i.e. interesting from the perspective of comparative linguistics of the Balkans (as opposed to
comparative Balkan linguistics).
At issue here is a phenomenon which can
be referred to as "negative fusion," i.e. the joining of a negative marker with a verb to form a single
word unit. An example from earlier stages of English is Old English nille 'not wants' which
represents the negative marker ne fused with wille, 'he/she wants'. To a certain
extent, negative fusion is found in Modern English too, under the analysis of Zwicky & Pullum
1983 whereby -n't is not merely a syntactically generated clitic form of not but rather is a
morphologically generated affix; thus, won't, in their view, does not synchronically represent a
reduction of will + not, but rather is an independent formation with n't being
an affixal realization of the feature of negation.28 Moreover, the degree of fusion can vary within
a language, for alongside the fused -n't in English there is the more independent free
form not, seen in (12a/b); however, even not shows some degree of dependency,
as it is generally separable from most auxiliaries, as in (12a/b), but nonetheless can not be separated
from do, as shown by (12c) and the contrast between it and (12a/b/d):
(12) a. John will definitely not win
b. John must definitely not win
c. *John did definitely not win
d. John definitely did not win.
Within the Balkans, a wide range of
evidence for negative fusion is available. In South Slavic, for instance, there are isolated
grammaticalized and fully univerbated forms in which the negative marker has fused with the
verb, e.g. the prohibitive marker nemoj found in Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian,
and the negative future marker based on 'have' found in Bulgarian in the form njama and
Macedonian as nema. In addition, though, there are more productive ways in which negative
fusion is evident in South Slavic. Alexander 1994 has shown, for example, that the prosodic
behavior of the negative morpheme ne in verbal groups and clitic sequences exhibits some degree
of fusion in that it forms a single prosodic domain with other elements but is nonetheless quite
readily analyzable as a separate element; the Serbo-Croatian negative future
based on 'want', e.g. necu 'I won't', is a case in point, since cu in general shows
some synchronic clitic-like properties (though not necessarily in this combination) making the
synchronic analysis of the form quite transparent. Some combinations are less parsable, such
as the Serbo-Croatian negative of 'be' (e.g. nisam 'I am not', etc.), which has a full
paradigm and a clear connection to nonnegated clitic forms of 'be', but shows a contraction
of the negative with 'be' that gives a synchronically unpredictable
result.29
In Greek, negative fusion is found with
the indicative negator den, which, following the Zwicky & Pullum criteria, is best analyzed
as verbal affix because, as discussed in Joseph 1990, it is fixed in its position, occurring on
left margin of verbal complex, it is restricted to being only a verbal negator, and it shows
some semantic idiosyncrasies, e.g. in the expression den mu les which means 'by the way'
but is literally "you don't say," and thus is negative in form without any negative semantics.
Moreover, a further argument can be
developed for the affixhood of den: it cannot be doubled in and of itself even when the
semantics of doubled negation are appropriate; thus, the Greek equivalent of 'I don't not smoke
for health reasons but because I hate the taste' cannot have *de(n) de(n), but must resort
to a circumlocutory paraphrase. Also, the doubling of den: is not possible even though
Greek allows the occurrence of two "slots" for negation elements when each has a different form;
thus, dencan co-occur with the nonindicative negation element mi in the combination
na mi denthat can occur for some speakers in a negative complement to fovame
'I fear', as in (13):30
(13)
fovame |
na |
mi |
den erthi |
(Veloudis 1982:11) |
fear/1SG |
SUBJUNC |
mi |
not come/3SG |
'I am afraid that he may not come' |
This situation is parallel to the argument Zwicky 1987 gave for the English
possessive 's as a (phrasal) affix, based on what he terms a "shape
condition" that blocks a phonological form, something that in his conception
of grammar, with a "phonology-free syntax" in which syntactic rules cannot
make 'reference to phonological elements, ought to be a matter of morphology
and not syntax.
Nonetheless, despite being generally
affixal and thus a fused element, den does seem to have some independence in the sense
that it can be picked out in a "mention" function; that is, one can say ise olo "den" simera
'You are quite negative today' (literally: "You are all "den" today"), a possibility which
seems somewhat anomalous for affixes, though admittedly perhaps not impossible. The English
equivalent You are all "n't" today is distinctly odd, suggesting that fused
(i.e. morphological) forms in general are not available to be
mentioned.31
Thus in Balkan Slavic and Greek, at least,
negative fusion can be found to varying degrees. Such a situation typically makes one wonder
if there is something "Balkanological" going on here, that is something of interest for comparative
Balkan syntax in the sense defined above in section 3. Here, the answer is probably not, for
the usual reasons: the observed negative fusion could be an inherited tendency and moreover
it is typologically quite a "natural" phenomenon.
For one thing, a consideration of
a broader range of Slavic data shows that fusion between the negative marker and a verb,
especially with the verbs 'have' and 'be', is widespread in non-Balkan Slavic, including both
East and West Slavic. Thus one finds njama 'there is no', from the verb 'have',
in Belorussian, ne treated as a prefix on the verb in both Czech and Slovak, special
negated forms in Sorbian of 'want', 'have', 'can', and 'be', and so
forth.32 Moreover, this
situation is not surprising, since the oldest available Slavic, Old Church Slavonic, shows
fused forms of 'be', e.g. nesm' 'I am not' (= *ne +
esmi).33
Looking more widely yet, one can
note cases of negative fusion throughout Indo-European, such as Latin nolo
'I do not want' (= *ne + wolo 'want'), or Old Irish ni
'is not' (from *nest < *ne + est). Sometimes, the details of the
fusion, even the apparently very common sort with 'be', are such that it must have happened
independently. Thus, Lithuanian nera 'is not', with a synchronically irregular
contraction of ne 'not' plus yra 'is', occurred within Baltic after the
innovative replacement of inherited *H1esti (cf. Old Lithuanian esti 'is') by
yra as the third person singular present form of 'be'. Finally, the fusion was not
complete in all the languages: in Gothic, the negative marker ni is dependent, occurring as
an enclitic between a lexical preverb and the verb in forms such as mip-ni-qam
'did not come with'.
Therefore, negative fusion can occur
independently, and so could have arisen on its own in each of the Balkan languages that show it.
Furthermore, there is direct evidence that it has occurred independently in the Balkans,
for in early 20th century Tsakonian, often called a dialect of Greek but divergent enough
to perhaps warrant at that time at least being called a different language, a "negative"
auxiliary verb 'be' developed. This negative auxiliary is a crucial piece of verbal system,
since 'be' is used with a participle to form ordinary present tense. The relevant forms are
given in (14), where some irregularities can be noted that argue against a ready synchronic
analysis of at least some negated forms into the synchronic negative marker o with a positive
form of 'be':34
(14)
Positive |
Negative (= NEG + Positive) |
1SG |
eni |
1PL |
eme |
1SG |
oni |
1PL |
ome |
2 |
esi |
2 |
ethe |
2 |
osi |
2 |
othe |
3 |
eni |
3 |
in'i |
3 |
on'i |
3 |
un'i |
The synchronic negator o derives from earlier u
(Ancient Greek < ou >) and most likely was extracted out of a contraction of / u / plus
vowel-initial forms of verbs (e.g. auxiliaries in the present and imperfect tenses, the prefixed
"augment" past tense marker in the simple past). Thus the contraction in the negative forms is
regular diachronically, deriving from */u + e/ and 3PL */u + i/, and for all but the third person
plural form is synchronically regular also as /o + e/; but for the third person plural form, the
contraction is not regular synchronically, for /o + i/ would not be expected to yield [u]. Similarly,
reduced forms of 'be' show synchronic irregularities: the third person singular positive form is
en or n, but the corresponding negative is o, with no [n].
It must be concluded, therefore,
that these facts concerning negative fusion in the Balkans are interesting from the perspective
of the "linguistics of the Balkans" or the "comparative syntax of the Balkans," but not from
the perspective of "Balkan Linguistics" or "comparative Balkan syntax." Each language
reveals an interesting phenomenon but its occurrence in each language need not be attributed
to language contact in any form, and thus is not immediately relevant to the concerns of the
investigation of the Sprachbund as a contact-induced phenomenon.
5. Conclusion
The extended examples in the previous section show the virtues of keeping both types of
pursuits in mind, and clearly, researchers must be cognizant of both. Both enrich our
understanding of language in general and of the languages in the Balkans specifically.
The more we know about language in general, the better able we are to judge the particulars
of the languages of the Balkans, both in terms of how these languages fit into the general
domain of natural human languages and in terms of how they fit into the more specific
domain of "Balkan languages." Moreover, the two approaches work well together; pursuing
the comparative syntax of Balkan languages identifies possible candidates for comparative
Balkan syntax, and when working in the Balkans one must always keep the Sprachbund
in mind, even if we end up learning more about individual languages when we feel free
to reject language contact and focus just on the language-internal syntax of one language in
omparison with the language-internal syntax of another.
Acknowledgments
This paper was developed for the "After-GLOW" Workshop on Balkan Syntax, held
in Athens in April of 1996. I would like to thank the workshop organizers, Angela Ralli
and Irene Philippaki-Warburton, for the invitation that gave me the opportunity to try these
thoughts out on a knowledgeable audience, whose insightful comments were useful to me as
I revised the paper for this volume. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Victor Friedman of the
University of Chicago and Nick Nicholas of the University of Melbourne, who both also
provided numerous important suggestions for improving the paper. Naturally, all are absolved
of any complicity in remaining errors.
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Notes
1My source for this characterization of Universal Grammar is David Perlmutter, based
on class lectures he presented at MIT over 20 years ago which I was privileged to have been
able to sit in on. I do not know if this view is original with him or if he was passing on what
he had learned from someone else, but I am pleased to be able to acknowledge the role he
played in sharpening my understanding of linguistic theory through such
statements.
2See, for instance, the papers in Jaeggli & Safir (1989a).
3For example, it is not at all obvious why there should be any link between the
structure of verbal paradigms and the possibility of null subjects. Moreover,
Jaeggli and Safir themselves, in the face of a counter-example from Dutch (discussed
in their footnote 19), retreat somewhat and suggest that perhaps "up to one stem
identical form [in a paradigm with stem + affix forms otherwise/BDJ], excluding
imperatives, is permitted" (p. 40).
4As discussed by Thrasher 1974, sentences like:
- Seems like no one cares! (= It seems like no one cares!)
- Can't get there from here! (= You can't get there from here!)
suggest that English has some pro-Drop-like structures, but as he points out, more than
just subjects can be deleted:
- Gotta run! (= I 've gotta run)
- Cold? (= Are you cold?)
- Guy over there is crazy! (= The guy over there is crazy!).
Moreover, such strings are not possible in subordinate clauses (e.g. *John warned Mary
that O can't get there from here) suggesting that pro-Drop is not at work in these English
utterances. Still, when faced with just sentences like (i) and (ii), an English-speaking child
conceivably could develop an analysis akin to a Null-Subject analysis, making it unclear
what it means to speak of a "pro-Drop" or "Null-Subject" language.
5See Joseph 1994 regarding the retention of weak subject pronouns in one
Greek construction, a locative interrogative construction with pun 'where is/are?'
(e.g. pun dos 'Where is he?'), even though Greek generally is a well-behaved typical pro-Drop
language; similarly, Morin 1985, 1988 analyzes voici and voila 'here is/are' in French as
subject-less predicates in an otherwise non-pro-Drop language.
6See Nevis et al. 1994 for access to the literature on Romance clitic studies and
Germanic V2 up through 1992. Roberts 1997 provides some updating on more recent work,
with discussion.
7See for instance Schaller 1975, 1977 and Banfi 1985 for references.
8There is no really suitable widely-agreed upon English term,
though "linguistic area" is sometimes used (cf. Campbell, Kaufman, & Smith-Stark 1986,
for example). "Convergence area"probably conveys the meaning best, but I adopt the
German term nonetheless, following the vast majority of scholars writing in English in this
practice.
9It is often the case that languages in a Sprachbund are not related
to one another or at least not closely related; in the case of the Balkans, although most
of the relevant languages are Indo-European, they represent different subgroups (branches)
of the Indo-European family.
10As this last trait shows, part of what makes languages in a Sprachbund
of considerable interest is not just the fact that they converge on one another but that this
convergence represents a divergence from their previous stages and from other genetically
and geographically related languages. Furthermore, for Sprachbund members that are
genetically related, the convergent features are not a matter of a shared inheritance from
their common ancestor.
11Language abbreviations here are "Alb" for Albanian, "Blg" for
Bulgarian, "Grk" for Greek, "Rmn" for Romanian; elsewhere, "Mac" is used for
Macedonian and "Trk" for Turkish.
12As Eric Hamp has remarked on occasion, Proto-Indo-European
did not even have a definite article, so the postposed article cannot possibly be an inheritance
from the common ancestor to these languages. Similar observations hold for the other
features cited here.
13For example, by Sandfeld (1930: 106), who discussed this convergence
in the context of seeking an explanation for the apparently innovative occurrence of a
'have'-plus-participle pluperfect in Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, the most centrally
Balkan varieties of Romanian, as opposed to its absence in Daco-Romanian). The existence
of parallel forms in Greek, Albanian, and Macedonian led Sandfeld to suspect language
contact as the source of the Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian formation, and he eventually
concluded that "il semble preferable de penser a une influence grecque" (p.106).
14 That is, passive when formed from a transitive verb, and active
when formed from an intransitive verb.
15Admittedly, in the context of a comparison with English,
the occurrence of a past perfect with 'have' and a participle may not seem remarkable,
but it is noteworthy that Romance languages typically use 'have' with a participle for a
regular past tense (e.g. the French passe compose, the (Daco-)Romanian perfectul
compus) and not for a perfect tense, and that the 'have' perfect is not found elsewhere
within Slavic.
16The Greek pluperfect cited here consists of the past of 'have' with a
(generally passive) participle; there is also a pluperfect, innovated in the Medieval
Greek period, formed with 'have' followed by an invariant verb form which historically
continues the older infinitive, but which synchronically may be nothing more than a
variant participial form, e.g. ixa desi 'I had tied', as discussed in Joseph 1983. There
are present perfect forms corresponding to these pluperfects in Albanian, Macedonian,
and Greek (and even a future perfect in Greek), but in Greek at least it seems that pluperfect
was the starting point for this type of perfect (see Joseph 1999 for some discussion).
17In Turkish, the usual meaning of the juxtaposition of the aorist
with a negative aorist form is 'as soon as ...', e.g. gelir gelmez 'as soon as (s)he comes'.
While this anomaly regarding ister istemez may point to that pattern with that particular
root being a borrowing into Turkish, it must be noted that the verb ol- 'be' also shows
an anomalous meaning for the aorist-plus-negative-aorist construction (olur olmaz means
'any old ...; just any ...'), suggesting that irregularities here may well be a function of
the high frequency of these verbs. Clearly, the Balkan side of this construction needs
further investigation (see Joseph (to appear) for some suggestive disucssion).
18Including much of my own earlier work, I regret to relate.
19The Arvanitika facts and the analysis given here are taken from
Tsitsipis (1981:347); see also Joseph 1992 for further discussion.
20The invariant ending -ondas is the old accusative singular of the
present active participle apparently with the masculine nominative singular ending -s
added on (though Horrocks 1997 also suggests that the -s may be an adverbial marker,
as in dialectal Greek totes 'then' versus Standard Greek tote, which would be motivated
by the circumstantial use of the participle). The accusative origin of the ending indicates
that nonsubject control was indeed once possible (as a participle the form agreed in case
with the nominal it was associated with), and it can be speculated that the innovative
further characterization of the ending with a nominative desinence coincided with the
form being restricted to subject-only control of its understood subject.
21Admittedly, the development of the Tocharian form is not completely
straightforward, according to some accounts of Tocharian historical phonology (especially
that of van Windekens 1976; see Joseph 1991 for some discussion). Whatever the
prehistory of Tocharian ma, the reconstruction of PIE *me is secure.
22The Albanian forms and sentences in (8) are taken from Newmark,
Hubbard, & Prifti 1982 and Duro & Hysa 1981; the sources for the Greek are given where
appropriate, with all other Greek data coming from consultation with native speakers.
23The terms "demotic" and "katharevousa" refer respectively to the low
and high style varieties of Greek that functioned in a diglossic relationship for much of the
19th and 20th centuries in the Greek-speaking world. The details of this relationship,
which permeates Greek linguistics even today when katharevousa no longer has the
official status it held into the 1970's, are not of concern here; see Mackridge 1990 for
some recent discussion of the history and resolution of Greek diglossia.
24Basically the voiceless stops, which typically become voiced after
the nasal and induce place assimilation on the nasal; for some speakers, the nasal can
then be deleted under complex partly sociolinguistically governed conditions - see
Arvaniti & Joseph (To appear) for some discussion. Before fricatives, the nasal can
appear, mainly in careful speech.
25Janda & Joseph 1996, 1997 discuss this issue, proposing the use
of the construct they refer to as the "(morphological) rule constellation" to capture the
simultaneous similarities and differences in the various realizations of mi(n); see, e.g.,
Janda & Joseph 1986, 1989, 1992, and Joseph & Janda 1988 for more discussion
of "constellations."
26Thus, ma can occur independently (though often repeated, as ma
ma) but only in the meaning 'Not so!', a somewhat emphatic negation, not a prohibitive.
There is also an elliptical use of ma that is prohibitive in value, e.g. ma svabdam
'Not a word!' (where the accusative form of svabda- suggests a missing governing
verb).
27Admittedly, this feature would be found just in two languages, though
with possibly more information Romany could be added to the list; still, there are Sprachbund
features that are not found in all the languages, e.g. the postposed definite article is absent
from Greek, so that it is not essential that a "Sprachbund feature" be found all over the region.
28I find Zwicky and Pullum's argumentation quite compelling, and
so opt for the affixal analysis of -n't here; facts such as the totally idiosyncratic
morphophonemics for the shape of will in combination with -n't are part
of their evidence, for such idiosyncrasies are more typical of affixal combinations
than clitic ones. The historical origin of won't as a reduction of will not is irrelevant
to the synchronic analysis.
29In that way, nisam is somewhat like won't in English,
discussed in the previous footnote.
30As discussed in Section 4.1, the mi that occurs in these complements
to verbs of fearing is pleonastic.
31Bound forms can, however, occasionally be "liberated" and take
on independent status, as with the use of ism in English as a free noun meaning
a 'a distinctive doctrine, system, or theory' (American Heritage Dictionary s.v.),
extracted from nouns such as socialism, communism, etc.
Thus mention might be possible in principle.
32See the sketches in Comrie & Corbett 1993 for relevant details.
33The pan-Slavic nature of negative fusion, especially with 'be'
and 'have', need not mean that any given fused form in a Slavic language must be an
old feature, and it is not clear just how much of this phenomenon can be or even should
be reconstructed for Common Slavic. Still, its occurrence in earliest attested Slavic and
its widespread nature would suggest that at least some of the fused forms are old, though
they may well have provided a pattern for the innovative spread of fusion to other verbs.
I am grateful to Daniel Collins and Charles Gribble for helpful discussion on this issue.
34All Tsakonian data, and most of the interpretations, are taken from
Pernot 1934.