Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Ideology, Multilingualism, and Syntactic Variation in Albanian and Macedonian

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Macedonian and Albanian share striking similarities in grammatical structure. Despite being very distant descendants from Indo-European (comparable to the difference between English and Persian), these languages share such similarity in grammar and phraseology that some sentences can be translated word-for-word, a phenomenon that specialists in Balkan languages argue to have resulted from a social system that encouraged mutual multilingualism among speakers of these languages for a period of centuries. Their surface similarities have been accounted for as an inventory of "Balkanisms" -- commonalities in word order, grammatical construction, and word building shared between Balkan languages as a result of contact between these languages and not due to inheritance from their respective linguistic predecessors. These findings, however, have not necessarily been mapped with cross-linguistically comparable theoretical descriptions that would connect them to broader research on how the human mind produces and comprehends language. Prendergast will examine three syntactic Balkanisms that recommend themselves to both socio-cultural linguistic investigation and theoretical syntactic description: 1) overt direct and indirect object doubling by a clitic pronoun; 2) relative clause head-marking; and 3) definite article omission in prepositional phrases. These syntactic Balkanisms share an orientation toward a generative syntactic theoretical primitive: the determiner phrase (DP). Prendergast will collect data in Albania and the Republic of Macedonia over six months on language use and social attitudes toward language among Macedonian- and Albanian-speakers by means of ethnographic interviewing and structured surveys gauging speakers' grammaticality judgments. He will seek to plot variation in these syntactic Balkanisms according to the dynamics of multilingual speaker contact (or lack thereof) in contemporary Republic of Macedonia, assessing whether speakers who continue traditional Balkan multilingualism differ in their underlying grammatical structures from speakers who participate in a new social model of Balkan monolingualism and ethnic segregation. Data on these variations then become the basis for a generative syntactic description of the Balkan DP. The results of this project will contribute to current theoretical syntactic research on the DP cross-linguistically. Prendergast seeks to demonstrate that there are "deep structural Balkanisms" important to understanding the process of mutually multilingual contact among speakers, a situation that has shaped the development of a considerable number of languages around the world. This project will also enhance the training of a graduate student.