Slovensko-romanski jezički kontakt na primeru dve pojave iz rezijskog
Slavic-Romance Language Contact: the Case of Two Phenomena in Resian

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the mechanisms of language contact in shaping two aspects of Resian nominal and clausal syntax, the quantifier karjë ‘many, much’ and the rise of subject clitics. Resian is a definitely endangered Slavic variety spoken by not more than 1000 speakers in the Italian Alps, which has been in intense contact with Romance (Friulan and Italian) for centuries. It is well known that language contact is the principal trigger for language change (Kroch, 2001). The contact, indeed, has been readily invoked in some descriptive work on Resian (Skubic, 2000) to account for the observed Romance-like traits of Resian grammar. In order to account for the observed changes, which point to the direction of developing Romance-like traits, I propose instead a scenario which relies on the interplay of both internal and external causes (along the lines of Heine and Kuteva, 2005), with the initial trigger being provided internally (e.g. phonological changes, structural gaps).

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