Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Ideology, Multilingualism, and Syntactic Variation in Albanian and Macedonian

马其顿语和阿尔巴尼亚语在语法结构上有着惊人的相似性。尽管它们是印欧语系的远亲（与英语和波斯语的差异相当），但这些语言在语法和短语上有如此相似之处，以至于有些句子可以逐字翻译，巴尔干语言专家认为，这种现象是几个世纪以来鼓励这些语言使用者相互使用多种语言的社会制度造成的。它们表面上的相似性被认为是一种“巴尔干主义”的清单——巴尔干语言之间在词序、语法结构和单词构建方面的共性，这是这些语言之间接触的结果，而不是由于从各自的语言前辈那里继承的。然而，这些发现并不一定与跨语言可比较的理论描述相对应，这些理论描述将它们与更广泛的关于人类思维如何产生和理解语言的研究联系起来。Prendergast将研究三种句法上的巴尔干主义，这些巴尔干主义对社会文化语言学研究和理论句法描述都有帮助：1)直接和间接宾语通过修辞代词加倍；2)定语从句标头；3)介词短语中的定冠词省略。这些句法上的巴尔干主义都有一个共同的取向，即指向一个生成句法理论原语：限定词短语（DP）。普伦德加斯特将在阿尔巴尼亚和马其顿共和国收集为期六个月的数据，通过人种学访谈和结构化调查来衡量说话者的语法判断，了解说马其顿语和说阿尔巴尼亚语的人对语言的使用和社会态度。他将根据当代马其顿共和国多语使用者接触（或缺乏接触）的动态，试图绘制这些句法巴尔干化的变化，评估继续使用传统巴尔干多语的使用者在其潜在语法结构上是否与参与巴尔干单一语言和种族隔离的新社会模式的使用者不同。关于这些变化的数据然后成为巴尔干DP生成语法描述的基础。本课题的研究成果将为当前的跨语言DP理论句法研究做出贡献。普伦德加斯特试图证明，存在着“深层次的结构性巴尔干主义”，这对于理解使用者之间相互使用多种语言的接触过程非常重要，这种情况影响了世界上相当多语言的发展。这个项目也将加强研究生的训练。

Macedonian and Albanian share striking similarities in grammatical structure. Despite being very distant descendants from Indo-European (comparable to the difference between English and Persian), these languages share such similarity in grammar and phraseology that some sentences can be translated word-for-word, a phenomenon that specialists in Balkan languages argue to have resulted from a social system that encouraged mutual multilingualism among speakers of these languages for a period of centuries. Their surface similarities have been accounted for as an inventory of "Balkanisms" -- commonalities in word order, grammatical construction, and word building shared between Balkan languages as a result of contact between these languages and not due to inheritance from their respective linguistic predecessors. These findings, however, have not necessarily been mapped with cross-linguistically comparable theoretical descriptions that would connect them to broader research on how the human mind produces and comprehends language.Prendergast will examine three syntactic Balkanisms that recommend themselves to both socio-cultural linguistic investigation and theoretical syntactic description: 1) overt direct and indirect object doubling by a clitic pronoun; 2) relative clause head-marking; and 3) definite article omission in prepositional phrases. These syntactic Balkanisms share an orientation toward a generative syntactic theoretical primitive: the determiner phrase (DP).Prendergast will collect data in Albania and the Republic of Macedonia over six months on language use and social attitudes toward language among Macedonian- and Albanian-speakers by means of ethnographic interviewing and structured surveys gauging speakers' grammaticality judgments. He will seek to plot variation in these syntactic Balkanisms according to the dynamics of multilingual speaker contact (or lack thereof) in contemporary Republic of Macedonia, assessing whether speakers who continue traditional Balkan multilingualism differ in their underlying grammatical structures from speakers who participate in a new social model of Balkan monolingualism and ethnic segregation. Data on these variations then become the basis for a generative syntactic description of the Balkan DP.The results of this project will contribute to current theoretical syntactic research on the DP cross-linguistically. Prendergast seeks to demonstrate that there are "deep structural Balkanisms" important to understanding the process of mutually multilingual contact among speakers, a situation that has shaped the development of a considerable number of languages around the world. This project will also enhance the training of a graduate student.