Morphosyntactic variation and contact: A comparative view from Daco-Romance

Abstract

My dissertation aims to offer an original analysis of the diachronic evolution of Daco-Romance nominal and verbal domains, which brings together data from both Latin/Romance and Balkan varieties, e.g. Macedonian, Bulgarian, Greek. While Daco-Romance varieties, i.e. Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian, split around the tenth century, there are no written attestations of these varieties up until the end of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, a comparative Romance and Balkan perspective can provide valuable evidence for the early (unattested) stages and can explain the differences encountered between Daco-Romance and, for example, Italo-Romance and Ibero-Romance. To name but a few examples, Daco-Romance generally displays postnominal definite articles (cf. Ro. pietrele vs It. le pietre ‘the stones’) and completely lacks the synthetic future, displaying instead a Balkan-style future construction made from the auxiliary WANT and the infinitive (cf. Ro. voi dormi vs It. dormirò ‘I will sleep’). Indeed, these different evolutions can be accounted for, I argue, by assuming that Latin spoken in Dacia had strong head-initial tendencies, similarly to what happened across the Balkans, while the rest of late Latin/early Romance speaking territories were still oscillating between a head-final and a head-initial syntax, although even in the case of the latter ones the generalised tendencies were towards head-initial. In essence, head-initial varieties are assumed to extensively employ functional elements such as definite articles and auxiliaries; that would explain why, since its earliest attestations, sixteenth century Daco-Romanian consistently displayed (second-position) definite articles and past/future auxiliaries, with texts showing little to no variation. A second aim of my project is to comparatively analyse Daco-Romance varieties in synchrony and to highlight how language contact influenced their evolution. After their split around the tenth century, Istro-Romanian has been in contact with Croatian, Aromanian – with Greek and Albanian, and Megleno-Romanian – with South Slavonic and Greek. For example, similarly to the situation encountered in South Slavonic varieties, Megleno-Romanian displays nowadays second-position definite articles, while Daco-Romanian (e.g., spoken in Romania and The Republic of Moldova) has generalised definite and indefinite declensions, i.e. nouns are specified in the lexicon as to their (in)definite value. Interestingly, less variation can be encountered in the verbal domain, where all varieties display generalised HAVE for the analytic past, irrespective of the morphological reflexes found in the contact languages (e.g. Istro-Romanian displays HAVE, while Croatian exclusively employs BE).