The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic

 

 

 

Project Description

 

The project investigates the grammatical factors involved in cliticization from a comparative diachronic perspective. It has so far been discovered (Pancheva 2005) that 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 Old Slavic underwent a configurational switch in the headedness of the TP, from head-final to head-initial (Pancheva 2008). It is hypothesized that the change in head-directionality of TP triggered the syntactic reanalysis of clitics from verb-final to second-position ones. Clitics are attracted by a feature of T, and when T changed its linear order with respect to the verb, so did the clitics.

In addition to addressing theoretical questions in the grammar of clitics and clause structure, the project has yielded findings concerning historical change in the domains of aspect (Łazorczyk 2007, 2008) and determiners (Łazorczyk and Pancheva 2008).

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.

 

 

Funding & Duration

 

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0418581) for the period September 2004-August 2008.

 

Participants

 

Principal Investigator: Roumyana Pancheva (Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures, USC)

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.

 

 

Publications & Talks

 

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.

 

Łazorczyk, A. and R. Pancheva. (2008). “From “Two” to “Both”: Historical Changes in the Syntax and Meaning of Oba in Slavic” In Proceedings of the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2007: Little Words, 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.