Morphological Cross-Linguistic Parallelisms among the Nominal Systems of Balkan Languages (I)
Morphological Cross-Linguistic Parallelisms among the Nominal Systems of Balkan Languages (I)

Summary/Abstract: Having been spoken for centuries within a limited geographical region – the Balkan Peninsula – theRomanian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian languages have necessarily been in permanentcontact. Whether prolonged or relatively short, direct or indirect, such contact between typologically but notgenealogically related languages has eventually led to the emergence, in two or several Balkan languages, ofcertain linguistic similarities which linguists acknowledge today as (phonetic, morphological, syntactic orlexical) Balkanisms. This paper addresses some of these parallelisms apparent in the nominal systems of theBalkan languages, namely the definite article and the genitive possessive article, as well as noun cases andgenders. While not aiming at exhaustiveness, this study reviews theories of outstanding Romanian and foreignlinguists on these issues, and illustrates such views with manifold cross-linguistic examples.

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