Partitivity in Slavic-Romance language contact: The case of Molise Slavic in Italy

Abstract

Molise Slavic is a south Slavic micro-language, spoken in three municipalities in the Italian region of Molise. It has been in a situation of total language contact with Romance varieties for about 500 years, with strong foreign influence on all linguistic levels. This paper is intended as a contribution to two combined fields of linguistics: contact linguistics and the expression of partitivity in Slavic in different settings. The paper opens with a short description of the position of the (morphological) partitive case in Russian, followed by a comparison of the role of case in expressing partitive objects in Russian, Croatian and Molise Slavic. The subsequent section will deal with other means of rendering pure and ablativic partitivity in Italian as the dominant model language and in the Molise Slavic replica, in particular with respect to the similarities and differences in existential constructions. Special attention will be paid to the Italian partitive particle ne and its formal and functional equivalents in Molise Slavic, including the particle na/ne, partitive personal pronouns, quantifiers, the genitive and the role of intonation and word order. Finally we will test various hypotheses about the origin of the particle na/ne, whose formal variation in one of the Molise Slavic dialects causes serious problems for both loanword integration and semantic calquing.

Clausal complementation in South Slavic

“…In contrast to the rather "unidirectional" areal cline, it is less clear where the loss of irrealis restrictions of da began; the most probable "candidates" are the northwestern end (early Slovene, Kajkavian) and the Adriatic coast (čakavian); cf. Grković-Major (2004;2020) and Greenberg (this volume). In either case, language contact (with German, Vulgar Latin or Italian, respectively) can be assumed to have been a catalyst of this process.…”

“…It is in such situations that the concept of a common diasystem or diagrammar of the two (or more) languages in question becomes evident. The concept of "diagrammar" is a theoretical model based on the hypothesis that multilingual speakers do not strictly separate the grammars of their two or more languages but combine them in the most economical way possible; see Breu (2011: 440) and Breu (2019bBreu ( , 2020. It could be argued that the grammars of the individual languages in contact are synchronically derived from their diagrammar, i.e.…”

Diachronic perspectives on change in spoken Croatian amongst Croatian indigenous minorities in Austria, Italy and Hungary

“…The influence of Italian seems obvious here as Italian has lost neuter gender. But neuter gender does remain in MOL.Cro as a relic form in specific contexts, namely with adjectives and pronouns in impersonal utterances (see below section 6.1.1) Breu (2013a). has shown that the contact situation accounts even for retention of neuter gender in MOL.Cro adjectives, due to the model of Molise Italian that itself has retained neuter gender in this case.…”