Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)

[R. Rankin]

As I mentioned, Bulgarian, Macedonian and the Torlak dialects of Serbian have
articles -- postposed.  I'm told, but have no first-hand knowledge, that a few
dialects of Russian well to the East of Moscow use /to/, /ta/, /tot/ as definite
articles.  I can't vouch for that.

Maybe we'd better get back to Siouan?

bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Kaufman" <dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2004 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: Balkan tongues (was: biloxi update)


> Is Bulgarian the only Slavic language to have articles?  I've studied Russian,
which of course has no articles, and I'm thinking most of the other Slavic
tongues don't either, with the exception of Bulgarian.  Was Bulgarian the only
Slavic language to be so influenced by this Romance and Greek trait of having
articles?  (And Albanian too, perhaps??)
>
> Dave
>
> "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Romanian is mostly the same in that the article attaches to noun modifiers
> preceding the noun
>
> copil 'child'
> copilu-l 'child-the' = the child
> mare-le copil 'big-the child' = the big child
>
> But in Romanian the demonstratives, acest, aceasta, acel, acela, etc. (there
are
> lots), are not derived from the same base as the articles, so there isn't the
> nice synchronic evidence for initial placement and subsequent "hopping" that
you
> have in Bulgarian/Macedonian. I don't know the status in Albanian.
>
> BTW, while I'm on Romanian articles, the textbook analysis of the masculine
> singular nominative-accusative article as a postposed -ul is wrong. The
> apparent suffix -ul is actually bimorphemic. The /-u/ is historically the
> masculine singular ending on the noun stem. The article is just the /-l/. (Or,
> more abstractly, /-lu/). There was a sound change that lost the -u regularly.
> So the proper segmentation of, say, calului 'of the horse' is calu + lu + i
> 'horse + art. + genitive. Not, as found in standard textbooks, *cal + ul + ui,
> or, worse, *cal + ului. Trust me, I wrote a whole dissertation of this stuff.
> :-)
>
> > 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.
>
> I completely agree.
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, if you believe in DP's that would be the analysis. I won't be drawn into
> that one though. :-) I think the answer there depends on higer-level
> theoretical beliefs.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
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