Journal of Contemporary Philology

FOREWORD

2025-06-24T13:34:47+02:00

This volume presents a series of contributions that address key morphosyntactic, semantic, phonological, and contact-induced phenomena in the languages and dialects of the Balkans. The eight studies collected here examine diverse linguistic structures within a shared areal and typological context, offering new data and analyses that contribute to our understanding of the Balkan Sprachbund and its internal diversity.

SYNTAX OF CLITICS IN BULGARIAN CONTACT DIALECTS

2025-06-26T12:14:40+02:00

The article analyzes interference phenomena in the syntax of clitics in Bulgarian dialects that have been in contact with the Romanian language over a long period of time. The analysis focuses on Bulgarian dialects spoken in the territory of Romania, as well as the specific dialect of Novo Selo in northwestern Bulgaria. It is assumed that both Romanian syntax and dialectal features introduced by Macedonian settlers have influenced this dialect. The principles of clitic order in the sentence, characteristic of Standard Bulgarian, are largely preserved in these dialects. This is mainly due to the fact that both the donor and recipient languages belong to the group of languages with verb-oriented clitics. The analysis shows that in the examined Bulgarian dialects, clitics can appear in initial position, which means that the Tobler-Mussafia law is violated under the influence of the contact languages. At the same time, most of the restrictions on initial clitic placement present in the donor language are shown to be irrelevant.

NEW RESEARCH ON ROMANI IN EASTERN NORTH MACEDONIA: THE MALESHEVO DIALECT

2025-06-26T12:15:15+02:00

This article presents new data on previously undescribed Romani varieties spoken in the eastern part of the Republic of North Macedonia, specifically in the geographical region of Maleshevo. We show that this is a South Balkan dialect that differs from other South Balkan dialects spoken in North Macedonia (especially in Skopje), while sharing several features with the Romani dialects of southwestern Bulgaria. This pattern corresponds to the geographical distribution of South Slavic dialects. Following South Slavic terminology, these Romani varieties can be referred to as Maleshevo-Pirin Romani. In addition to describing typical dialectal features, this study pays special attention to borrowings from local Macedonian dialects.

CONTACT-INDUCED CHANGES IN THE ORDER OF MODIFYING ADJECTIVES AND NOUNS IN SLAVIC DIALECTS IN ALBANIA

2025-06-26T12:17:03+02:00

In this article, I investigate the sociolinguistic factors that influenced the word order in nominal phrases in the South Slavic dialects that are spoken in Albania, with a specific focus on the impact of Albanian. Utilizing data from the Corpus of Slavic Dialects in Albania, I examined variations in adjective placement (pre- or post-noun) across several dialects – Golloborda Macedonian (GM), Korça Macedonian (KM), Prespa Macedonian (PM), and migrational Štokavian dialects from Shijak (SŠ) and Myzeqe (MŠ). The analysis revealed that the Albanian-influenced Noun-Adjective order (NADJ) was increasing in these dialects, and was mainly influenced by age, gender, residence type (rural versus urban), and type of community dwelling (compact versus dispersed). The stability of the conservative Adjective Noun (ADJN) order in compact communities and older generations in contrast to the increased Albanian-influenced NADJ usage among younger speakers and by those in dispersed communities, was particularly notable. The influence of standard Slavic languages may reverse the process by supporting the conservative ADJN word order. These findings contribute to the research on the areal spread of word order patterns.

LABILE VERBS IN MODERN ALBANIAN: A PRELIMINARY CORPUS-BASED STUDY

2025-06-26T12:17:41+02:00

The goal of the study is to analyze the use of labile verbs in the modern written Albanian language based on the Albanian National Corpus, which contains over 31 million words. In this paper, we present our findings from a pilot study of eight Albanian P-labile verbs belonging to different semantic groups that are typologically prone to lability. The study has shown that the selected verbs behave differently. Only phasal verbs filloj ‘begin’ and mbaroj ‘finish’ demonstrate consistent lability. The motion verb lëviz ‘move’ is used as a labile verb, with a predominance of active intransitive usages, while the verb ziej ‘boil; seethe; ferment’ shows variation between non-active and active intransitive usages. Deadjectival color verbs zbardh ‘whiten; brighten’ and skuq ‘make/color red; fry’ appear both transitively and intransitively, but only in their basic color-related meanings. The verb of distinction and change dalloj ‘distinguish; differentiate’ primarily employs active intransitive forms in reciprocal meanings and morphologically non-active forms in other meanings, while the related verb ndryshoj ‘change; vary, distinguish’ behaves as a typical labile verb, with a secondary development of non-active usages.

EVENT MODALITY IN BALKAN TURKISH: FORMAL AND SEMANTIC VARIATION IN CONTACT

2025-06-26T12:20:20+02:00

The present article constitutes the first part of a two-part study on event modality in selected Turkish varieties of Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Eastern Thrace (Turkey). The linguistic structures will be compared with corresponding expressions in Modern Standard Turkish and pre-modern Ottoman Turkish varieties. The study identifies both common features and differences among the Balkan Turkish varieties. Variation occurs in different slots within the investigated constructions and concerns lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic features, including complementation patterns, where both infinitive and subjunctive structures can be found. The linguistic variation is partly dialect-specific and distributed differently among the eastern and western dialects of Balkan Turkish, but intra-dialectal variation is also observed. It will be argued that while some processes that have led to the present situation in Balkan Turkish may be attributed to internal developments of inherited structures and to universal tendencies, impact of language contact has also contributed to the distribution of certain structures within the Turkish dialects of the Balkans.

ACCENT AS A BALKAN FEATURE

2025-06-26T12:22:21+02:00

The article examines two phonetic phenomena in the Balkan dialects of Macedonia: the restriction of accent placement to the last three syllables and double accentuation. These phenomena are characteristic of the Macedonian-Albanian-Greek area at the center of the Balkan Sprachbund. The author disagrees with the widely accepted thesis in Balkan literature that the western and central Macedonian dialects share a common accentual system with the Greek, Aromanian, and Albanian dialects in this region. The article presents arguments that challenge previous views on the central Balkan nature of the restriction of accent placement to the last three syllables. The author argues that this phenomenon does not merit special attention, as it represents a universal tendency driven by natural linguistic preferences. Regarding double accentuation, the author identifies a specific type of this phenomenon that may be considered a distinct Balkan trait. This type of accentuation is characteristic of a Balkan micro-region where Slavic and Greek dialects are in contact.

THE MACEDONIAN AND BALKAN SLAVIC THREE-PART ARTICLE AND THE TYPOLOGY OF DEICTIC ARTICLES

2025-06-26T12:22:53+02:00

Macedonian’s tripartite article system (proximal, neutral, and distal) aligns with similar systems found in other Balkan Slavic varieties, but also exhibits parallels with non-Slavic languages, such as Wolof, which feature deictic definite articles. This paper investigates the morphosyntactic and semantic features of these articles in Balkan Slavic, aiming to clarify their status within the broader typology of definiteness and deixis. We show through the study of the Macedonian spoken corpus that there are significant differences between the articles regarding their relative frequency. Cross-linguistic comparison further informs the typological status of these articles. In both Balkan Slavic and Atlantic languages like Wolof, definite articles are enclitics, with one form generally occurring significantly more frequently than the others. While interesting secondary functions such as nominal tense have been proposed for these articles, these features are not diagnostic of their “articlehood” and may be expressed by demonstrative pronouns in other languages.

LOST IN THE BALKANS: DIFFERENTIAL PLACE MARKING IN THE AROMANIAN VARIETIES

2025-06-26T12:27:10+02:00

The phenomenon of Differential Place Marking (Haspelmath 2019), also called zero-marking of spatial relations (Stolz et al 2014), has often been mentioned in the languages of the Balkans. Examples of such differential marking have been documented in the Aromanian varieties (Kramer 1981; Caragiu-Marioțeanu 1975), Modern Greek (Holton et al 1997), Macedonian (Koneski 1965), Ancient Greek (Luraghi 2017), and Latin (Haspelmath 2019; Kramer 1981). However, while the presence of Differential Place Marking has been widely acknowledged, detailed descriptions of such patterns in different varieties are still lacking. Our aim is to present and discuss linguistic data from Aromanian and other Balkan Romance varieties (Istroromanian and Meglen Vlach) to better understand the inter- and intra-dialectal variation of Differential Place Marking. We study and compare their occurrences in the linguistic transcripts from different synchronic Aromanian varieties: from Kruševo (Gołąb 1984), Ohrid and Struga (Markoviḱ 2007), and Turia/Kranéa (Bara et al 2005). The results of the comparative analysis suggest that the dialectal and diachronic picture is not uniform. Various semantic factors, such as the type of noun indicating location (proper vs. common) and whether the location is perceived as proximal or distant seem to play a key role.