Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory)

At the end of 1998, Professor Pieter Muysken was awarded the Spinoza prize of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NOW) and set up a research program entitled “Lexicon and Syntax”. The implementation of the Program started in the autumn of 1999 with research on the lexicon and syntax in a number of areas where contacts between 1 different languages are intensive. For the languages of many of the areas selected, basic data had to be collected. For most of the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund area, however, there are grammars and dictionaries. Moreover, quite a number of studies of the Balkan Spra- bund features have been published. Accordingly, when I joined the team of the Project, I aimed at a description of the state of art in the field. After several months of research, I realized that Balkanists have mainly been concerned with compiling lists of similarities and making parallels between the lexical and grammatical forms of the Balkan languages, while analyses of the interaction of the Balkan Sprachbund morpho-syntactic features with other features in the structure of the DP or the sentence of a given language/dialect are scarce. This oriented me towards descriptions of Balkan Spra- bund morpho-syntactic features in the context of individual sub-systems in nine Balkan language to which they relate – the Slavic languages Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbo-C- atian; the Romance languages Romanian, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian; Albanian; Modern Greek; and the Arli Balkan Romani dialect.