The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic

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How does the syntax of a language change over time? What kinds of innovations are possible, how are they triggered, and how are they constrained? Issues of historical change have increasingly been of interest to researchers in theoretical syntax, providing a new perspective to the scientific investigation into the principles of language design. Historical data, when properly interpreted through the prism of modern syntactic theory, can reveal the workings of the highly complex, richly structured grammatical system, by allowing the study of minimal variation and the clustering of grammatical properties, often not possible in comparisons of even closely related languages. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Roumyana Pancheva will address the theoretical implications of syntactic change, focusing on Medieval South Slavic. The project will concentrate on historical developments in two domains, the grammar of clitics and the syntax of verbal inflection, as well as on the way in which the changes in the two domains interact. An electronic corpus of texts, with added morphological and syntactic information, will be created in the course of the investigation, to facilitate grammatical analysis. The corpus will cover the manuscripts and inscriptions of Old Church Slavonic - the oldest recorded Slavic language - as well as texts from regional varieties of Old and Middle South Slavic. The wide linguistic coverage will allow for comprehensive comparative research - both diachronic, between historical stages of Medieval South Slavic, and synchronic, between the various regional dialects.Both the practical and the theoretical aspects of the proposal are novel in scope. The syntactic study will reveal the fundamental structure of the Medieval South Slavic clause and the developments it undergoes over time, providing the basis for any future research on Slavic diachronic syntax. It will investigate foundational issues in the grammar of cliticization, a peculiar phenomenon of natural language and a long-standing challenge to linguistic analysis. In particular, it is expected to document the rise of a second-position clitic system - the first such change to be described for any language. A detailed analysis of the change will contribute crucial information to our understanding of this clitic type and of the linguistic factors that make it possible. Also of interest is the origin of the second-position clitic system, which goes against the usual direction of historical change. Cross-linguistically, pronominal clitics tend to become verbal affixes. The earliest South Slavic clitics are verbal associates, yet they become syntactically independent of the verb and move to the second-position in the clause. The study will thus address the issue of whether diachronic laws that determine the direction of historical change exist independently of grammar. On the practical side, the project will provide the scholarly community with the first grammatically annotated, electronically available, chronological database of Medieval South Slavic texts. The corpus will facilitate the study of the historical and comparative grammar of the Slavic languages by allowing searches based on structural characteristics, and by making possible the application of statistical methods to linguistic analysis. More generally, it will be of interest to philologists, historians, religion scholars, and literature scholars.