Verbal Aspect in Istroromanian

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Istroromanian is a critically endangered language spoken in two villages on the Istrian peninsula in the Northwest of Croatia. There are two distinct dialects - Zheyanski and Vlashki. Though an Eastern Romance language, long-term contact with Chakavian, making it markedly different from both Daco-Romanian which is a central member of the Balkan sprachbund as well as Western Romance languages such as Italian or French. One of the most striking grammatical features of Istroromanian is its lexical aspect system. Very much like in Slavic languages such as Croatian, Russian or Czech, Istroromanian verbs come in lexical pairs, one of which denotes imperfective aspect, the other perfective aspect. For example, 'to drink' can either be rendered as be 'to drink (generally, repeatedly or for an extended time period)' or popi 'to drink (once), to drink up'. Imperfective aspect is traditionally described as employed for general statements as well as repeated actions, while perfective is 'goal-oriented' and one-off.Using Zvjezdana Vrzic's annotated corpus, deposited on ELAR, I aim to establish a formal typology of aspect pairs. Similarly to Slavic, Istroromanian aspect pairs can be formed through prefixation (making imperfectives perfective), change in conjugation pattern, change in stem vowels or suppletion. This will also allow us to spot bi-aspectual verbs and potential holes in the paradigm. Thereafter, discursive and syntactic contexts for each aspectual category will be collocated and using Klein's theory of aspect, I shall arrive at a working theory of Istroromanian aspect. In a next step, the audio materials collected by Anthony Hurren in the 1960's will be reviewed and annotated. The Hurren recordings have recently been digitised by the ISTROX project at Oxford and present a rich and varied collection of Istroromanian spoken 60 years ago. Together with smaller text collections from the early 20th century, it will be possible to give an account of Istroromanian aspect with historical depth and identify any possible changes that have occurred over the documented timespan.The intended project will achieve a number of things: first, it will help describe a critically endangered language while this is still possible on the basis of real-life data. Furthermore, annotating the Hurren recordings will ensure further interdisciplinary scholarship can be conducted on the materials. Second, Istroromanian makes for an interesting case study in Language Contact. Thomason and Kaufmann predict that intense and sustained language contact yields significant grammatical change in the languages concerned. How this change is structured, however, is not immediately clear from the onset. It will be interesting to see in what ways aspect lines up with and how it differs between Istroromanian and the local Chakavian dialect. Bulgarian and Macedonian, descriptions of which are plentiful, will also make for a fruitful point of comparison, since both feature a rich past tense system, morphological markers of definiteness and a lexical aspect system. Third, looking at Istroromanian will shed new light on aspect as a crosslinguistic category which has been notoriously difficult to describe satisfyingly.