Save the date! On Friday October 23, the Slavic Linguistics Forum will host Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley). Dr. Nichols will be speaking on a typological perspective on the Balkan Sprachbund, Slavic, and southwest Eurasia. Her talk is open to the entire university community.
Abstract:
What is interesting and distinctive in the Balkan linguistic type deserves more cross-linguistic and geographical attention than it has had. I use the patterning of several multivariate typological variables, which can reveal fine structural gradations, to address two issues:
1) In standard areal theory, enclaves should form clear typological clusters and should be discrete from their neighbors. The Balkan Sprachbund is a clear cluster but, far from discrete, it might be described as a typological apex of western Europe.
2) The sociolinguistics of contact in an area proves to be a good predictor of the behavior of some typological variables, but the sociolinguistics that produces known grammatical effects is not that of the Balkan Sprachbund. The findings of this survey imply that the Balkan linguistic type is not just the result of sheer contact and also not a hypertrophy of inherited types. Tracing it to a pre-IE substratum is a poor strategy because non-falsifiable, yet the Sprachbund does appear to reflect strong accommodation to the western end of a pre-existent Eurasian typological profile. But what does accommodation to a pre-existent type mean, substantively and concretely? I propose to answer the question by sketching out a model of language spreading in western Eurasia that can account in part for the Balkan situation.
