Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)

[Catherine Rudin/HU/AC/WSC]

OK, ok... here I am.  (And yes, I'm pretty crusty too.  "Geezerly" is the
preferred adjective around our house.)

Anyhow -- I confess I haven't been reading the whole Biloxi thread (until
the intriguing "Balkan" heading popped up) and I'm not going to go back and
read it all now, free time and knowledge about Biloxi both being in short
supply.  How did we get onto postposed articles?  Does this have anything
to do with the (lack of) infinitives also being bandied about on the list?
The Siouan/Balkan sprachbund???

Various Balkan and Scandinavian languages do indeed have postposed
articles, but they're syntactically very different from the phrase-final
articles (have we agreed to call them articles?) in Dhegiha.  At least in
the languages I'm most familiar with (Bulgarian/Macedonian/east Serbian
dialects) the article appears not at the end of the noun phrase, but
suffixed to the FIRST constituent of the phrase.  So we have classic
Bulgarian examples like:  (TA is the article, in caps to make it easily
visible)
      kolaTA     'the car'
      zelenaTA kola   'the green car'
      staraTA zelena kola   'the old green car'
      mojaTA stara zelena kola   '(the) my old green car'

I said "first constituent" and not "first word" because if the first word
is an adverb, the article follows the adjective that adverb modifies, i.e.
it is suffixed to the AdjP (roughly... the exact formulation is a matter of
hot debate in Balkan Slavicist circles).  For example:

      izvunredno staraTA zelena kola   'the unusually old green car'

But in any case the article is suffixed to the first/leftmost piece of the
nominal phrase, in some sense.  A standard analysis is that the article is
syntactically phrase-INITIAL, so the underlying form is something like "TA
... kola", and it "hops" onto the following word through some kind of
prosody-driven phonological process, very much like other clitics in these
languages (and a variety of "second position" elements in lots of other
languages).  Demonstratives are also phrase-initial determiners, but not
being clitics, they stay initial and don't "hop":   TAZI stara zelena kola
'this old green car' / ONAZI stara zelena kola 'that old green car'.

Is Romanian the same, Bob?

This is obviously nothing like the situation of articles in Dhegiha
languages, where they are phrase-FINAL, following the noun and all sorts of
modifiers.

As for the question of whether determiners in European (SVO) languages
"should" be postposed/phrase-final, that depends on whether determiners are
modifiers (within NP) or heads (of DP).  If determiners head their own
projection, you would expect them to be DP-final in OV languages, as they
in fact are in Omaha-Ponca and the rest of Dhegiha, and you would expect
them to be DP-initial in VO languages, as they in fact are in European
languages, including Bulgarian and I think all the other European languages
that have "postposed" articles.  (Though my Norwegian is just about nil and
my Albanian not a whole lot better!)

Cheers,
Catherine



> Swedish, and I suppose Norwegian and Danish, have post-posed definite
> articles too.

>>From the point of view of usual head/dependent orderings, virtually ALL
European
languages should have postposed definite articles and demonstratives just
as
they do adjectives.  But among SVO languages especially there are lots of
exceptions to the "usual".

You have a couple of crusty old (well only one is crusty and old)
Balkanists on
this lists and I'm waiting for Catherine to check in.  :-)

Bob