New book: Slavic Features in the History of Rumanian

[LINCOM EUROPA]

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SLAVIC FEATURES IN THE HISTORY OF RUMANIAN

Peter R. Petrucci, Northeastern State University, Tahlequah

This dissertation examines the role of Slavic phonological and
morphological features in the history of Rumanian.  Data are limited to
those phonological and morphological features purportedly attributable
to early Slavic language contact and which are present in all or most of
the Rumanian dialects--Rumanian, Arumanian, Megleno-Rumanian, and
Istro-Rumanian.
Two basic questions are asked: First, which structural features should
or should not be attributed to Slavic language contact?  This question
is significant because Slavic language contact features in the history
of Rumanian have been disputed among Romance and Slavic linguists for a
long time.  Some linguists have proposed a wide range of Slavic features
in Rumanian whereas others have proposed a much more limited set of
features.  Second, of those features which are indeed Slavic in origin,
what is the exact nature of the language contact process by which the
features were incorporated into Rumanian?  Regarding this issue, the
Slavic contact features are analyzed by means of Thomason and Kaufman's
(1988) theory of language contact, which identifies two distinct
processes by which a foreign feature can spread to another language:
borrowing, initiated by native speakers of the language incorporating
the non-native feature; or language shift, introduced by native speakers
of the language wherein the feature originated.  The dissertation
demonstrates that this model of language contact can efficiently account
for the Slavic structural features that appear in Rumanian.  Also, four
general criteria are proposed which give an indication of which
process(es) can account for how a given language contact feature was
incorporated into a language.

ISBN 3 89586 599 0.
LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 08.
Ca. 200pp. USD 70 / DM 112 / # 42.


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