Volume 61, Issue 2 - 2

The subject of the article are some peculiarities in the verbal system which give Macedonian a special place within the Slavonic language family and within the Balkan Sprachbund. In concrete terms, Macedonian is characterized by some features which approximate it towards Modern Greek: a tendency towards unification of the means of aspectual shift, exclusively dependent use of the present forms of perfective verbs and the de facto existence of only one past tense with allomorphs for both aspects. The so-called as a Balkanism shows differences in comparison with Bulgarian and proximity with Albanian and Modern Greek, whereas the parallelism of the two perfect forms and leads to a redistribution of their functions.

This paper examines the adversative discourse markers ама and ами in Macedonian in order to shed light on the interdependence of typology and convergence. Macedonian is typically located in the center of the Balkan Sprachbund. At the same time, a comparison of these two particular discourse markers in Macedonian and Bulgarian, both Balkan Slavic languages, demonstrates that a simplistic application of the criterion of Turkish borrowings would suggest that Bulgarian be considered the more central member of the Balkan Sprachbund. What the following discussion will reveal, however, is that the source of borrowing (i.e. Turkish versus Greek) is not as important as the actual fact of borrowing, i.e. the intensity of multilingual contact, for the determination of centrality.

The authors analyze the occurrence of habere -perfect in two formal registers that are supposed to be the least influenced by regional use. The goal of the paper is to establish how and why habere -perfect is spread in standard Macedonian. The corpus-based analysis shows that the perfect enters and spreads in the standard in a systematic way, through certain semantic verb classes in privileged contexts. It is claimed that habere -perfect favors light verb collocations with verbs of acquisition in possessive-existential contexts. The findings support the thesis that the most frequently encountered have -perfect type is used in functions characteristic of the early stages of grammaticalization.

The relationship between areal linguistics and typology can be illuminated and clarified by Macedonian dialectology, especially in the context of Balkan linguistics. This is especially important in analyses of the Balkan linguistic league, which, as an areal phenomenon, should be seen in historical perspective. On the one hand, Macedonian dialectology helps clarify the graded nature of the phenomenon itself, and on the other helps demonstrate that Macedonian is the most Balkanized of the Balkan languages.

With respect to its morphosyntactic features, the Macedonian language belongs to the same typological group as its closest relative – the Bulgarian language. However, considering their phonetic features, these two languages fall into different linguistic areas. While Bulgarian possesses typical East Slavic phonetics – related to the Eurasian linguistic community – Macedonian phonetics has many more features in common with Serbian than with Bulgarian. Both Serbian and Macedonian are members of a different (more European) phonetic type that, at the same time, is characteristic of Balkan phonetics. This paper presents the features determining the typology of the Macedonian phonetics.

The paper suggests that, at the dialect level, the Macedonian language should be viewed as part of the Balkan linguistic West, rather than the Balkan linguistic East. It is argued that the Macedonian, Serbian, Albanian and Arumanian languages share a number of common lexical, semantic, word formation and grammatical features that are not characteristic of the Greek-Bulgarian linguistic area. This explains the specific linguistic development on the Macedonian territory, which is characterized by the conservation of numerous Slavic archaisms on the one hand, and the accumulation of West Balkan innovative features, on the other.

The multi-lingual environment on the Balkans and its intensive contact with non-Slavic languages caused Macedonian to drift away from Common Slavic more than the other Slavic languages and to share with non-Slavic Balkan languages a number of typological features, referred to as Balkan Sprachbund features. Its verbal system is analytical to a considerable degree and its nominal case system is disintegrated. It has a general tendency towards explicit marking of grammatical functions with specific function words and towards uniformity of morphological markers.

The author analyzes the linguistic and extralinguistic factors which have influenced processes of standardization of the Macedonian language and processes of implementation of the standard norm. She compares the Macedonian situation with the situation in other Slavic linguistic communities.