The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic

随着时间的推移，一种语言的语法是如何变化的？哪些创新是可能的，它们是如何触发的，它们是如何受到约束的？历史变迁问题越来越受到理论句法研究者的关注，为语言设计原则的科学研究提供了新的视角。通过现代句法理论的棱镜恰当地解释历史数据，可以揭示高度复杂、结构丰富的语法系统的工作原理，因为它允许研究最小的变化和语法属性的聚类，这在即使是密切相关的语言的比较中通常也是不可能的。在国家科学基金会的资助下，鲁米亚纳·潘切娃博士将阐述句法变化的理论含义，重点是中世纪的南斯拉夫语。该项目将集中于两个领域的历史发展，即偏态语法和动词屈折变化的句法，以及这两个领域的变化相互作用的方式。在调查过程中，将建立一个电子文本语料库，其中增加了词法和句法信息，以方便语法分析。语料库将涵盖旧教堂斯拉夫语--最古老的斯拉夫语--的手稿和铭文，以及旧南斯拉夫语和中南斯拉夫语的地区变体的文本。广泛的语言覆盖面将允许进行全面的比较研究--既包括中世纪南斯拉夫历史阶段之间的历时研究，也包括不同地区方言之间的共时研究。该提案的实践和理论方面都是新颖的。句法研究将揭示中世纪南斯拉夫语从句的基本结构及其随时间的发展，为以后对斯拉夫语历时句法的研究提供基础。它将研究定位化语法中的基本问题，这是自然语言的一种特殊现象，也是对语言分析的长期挑战。特别是，它预计将记录第二位置派系系统的兴起--这是第一次为任何语言描述这种变化。对这一变化的详细分析将有助于我们理解这种克制类型以及使其成为可能的语言因素。同样令人感兴趣的是第二立场派系制度的起源，这与历史变化的通常方向背道而驰。从跨语言的角度来看，代词词缀往往会变成动词词缀。最早的南斯拉夫悬垂语是动词联想，但他们在句法上独立于动词，并移到从句中的第二位。因此，这项研究将探讨决定历史变化方向的历时规律是否独立于语法而存在的问题。在实践方面，该项目将向学术界提供第一个语法注释的、电子可用的中世纪南斯拉夫文献年表数据库。语料库将有助于研究斯拉夫语言的历史和比较语法，因为它允许根据结构特征进行搜索，并使统计方法能够应用于语言分析。更广泛地说，它将引起语言学家、历史学家、宗教学者和文学学者的兴趣。

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.