Donnerstag, 12.00 Uhr
The work to be presented is a part of the areal typological research programmes on the Circum-Baltic/North-East-European languages at Stockholm and Bern, cf. Dahl/ Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1992), Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.) (in progress) and Christen/Locher/Wälchli (1996).
The center of the linguistic area we will have a look at here is the Baltic and Fennic languages (both with a long time continuity) as well as the dialects of North Slavic languages (about from the 8th century). The periphery of this area is formed by North Germanic languages in the East, by Saami in the North and Mordvin and Mari (also the extinct Meria) in the East of it. (One should add Iranian languages at earlier stages in the South). Because of their close relationship Slavic languages outside the area cannot be excluded from the inquiry. Additionally there are (and were) a lot of secondary languages and dialects in this area such as Middle Low German, German, Yiddish, Romani, Karaim.
One of the most striking peculiarities of the area considered is that its central part is made up by languages that traditionally count as rather archaic members of the two genetic families involved (Indo-European and Finno-Ugric), genetic families that moreover share a significant number of typological similarities (partly due to earlier contacts). A lot of common areal features are thus archaisms or, to put it differently, are made up essentially of older features of the language families involved, this in contrast to other areas of Europe such as the Balkan or the SAE-languages whose common features are mostly innovative. The very center of our area, consisting of Livonian and Latvian (especially the low dialect) is, however, very innovative, both phonologically and syntactically, and tends to lose many of the features common to the Baltic and Fennic languages; furthermore it supports analytic procedures both in grammar (loss of adjective gradation, case syncretism, loss of the impersonal) and lexicon.
There have been several more or less serious attempts to delimit a sprachbund in this area on the basis of various phonetic, grammatical and lexical features, e.g., Jakobson’s intonation-sprachbund, Haarmann’s and Décsy’s "Peipus-sprachbund", Sahrimaa’s Karelian sprachbund, to mention only a few. All these attempts result, however, in different subsets of the languages, i.e. in different potential sprachbünde.
We will discuss some features (mostly syntactic, but also lexicosemantic) of the area that show either a typologically relevant isomorphism or also a more dynamic evolution and variant that crosses the genetic language borders. The features considered are connected to one another either in a functional or structural way:
lexical plurals/ plural nouns ("pluralia tantum")
collective numerals, nominalized numerals
adnominal partitive
object case marking
comparative
double/multiple case marking of non-verbal predicates
References:
zum Programm der AG 5
zur alphabetischen Übersicht der Abstracts
zur zeitlichen Übersicht