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Language Variation - European Perspectives VI: Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig, May 2015
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat Siebenhaar
[Studies in Language Variation 19] 2017
► pp. 141–156

Syntactic doubling and variation

The case of Romani

| Inalco & Lacito-CNRS, Paris
This paper analyses a case of syntactic doubling in Romani: the full doubling of the definite article in NPs including an adjective. This structure (dnda) is similar to the Greek polydefiniteness and displays the same grammatical optionality. A task was designed to trigger its use and submitted to Albanian Romani native speakers. The results show that an evolution in the nominal constituent order has taken place in contrastive contexts, whereby the community is still split into subgroups experiencing different patterns of language change. This doubling (dnda) has been used as a kind of bridge from the canonical word order (dan) to a new one (dna). Social factors show that this process has been favoured by contact with Albanian and/or Greek.
Keywords: syntactic variation, language change, language contact, doubling, polydefiniteness, Romani, Balkans
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1Linguistic factors
    • 3.2Social factors
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1The language contact hypothesis
    • 4.2Socio-linguistic account of the variation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.19.09tir
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Cited by one other publication

Adamou, Evangelia, Quentin Feltgen & Cristian Padure
2021. A unified approach to the study of language contact: Cross-language priming and change in adjective/noun order. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:6 ► pp. 1635 ff. DOI logo

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