Volume 65, Issue 3 -

This paper is an attempt to provide an overview of the typologically relevant features of restrictive relative clauses with a nominal head in Lower and Upper Sorbian. Its main concern are (1) the semantic distinction characteristic not only of Sorbian, but also of most other Slavonic languages between relative clauses where the head of the clause and its relativized counterpart are coreferential and those which merely indicate that the referent of the head of the clause has the same properties, represents the same type as the referent of its relativized counterpart, (2) the various relativizers used to express this distinction and (3) the relativization strategies as well as the degree of accessibility to relativization involved in each case.

In this paper, we discuss different types of verbal aspect in three varieties of Sorbian, Standard Lower and Upper Sorbian and Colloquial Upper Sorbian. There are basically two formally differentiated aspect oppositions in Sorbian, the Slavic opposition of perfectivity, expressed by stem alternations (prefixation, suffixation and suppletion) and thus grammatically derivative, and the opposition of aorist and imperfect, expressed by inflection. These two types are, however, restricted in their distribution, as modern Lower Sorbian lacks the inflectional type completely, and Colloquial Upper Sorbian uses it only with auxiliaries, modal verbs and some verbs of speech. Even in Standard Upper Sorbian the independence of the two oppositions is rather relative, as only the second and third person singular have different endings for the two grammemes, whereas in all other persons formal differences between imperfect and aorist are expressed, if at all, only by stem alternations, dependent on the opposition between the imperfective and the perfective stem. Therefore, even in Standard Upper Sorbian we have a clear differentiation between perfective and imperfective only outside the synthetic past tense, e.g. in the analytic l‑ past or in the future, while the imperfect is linked exclusively to the imperfective and the aorist to the perfective. While the functions of the stem-based aspect opposition are in the Standard languages of the common Slavic type, Colloquial Upper Sorbian has an idiosyncratic aspect type based functionally on an opposition of grammaticalized telicity. The reasons for the special characteristics of verbal aspect in the varieties of Sorbian in formal as well as in functional respect essentially go back to language contact with German. The ILA model of the interaction of the lexicon with aspect serves as a theoretical base for the following presentation.

The Sorbian languages basically use a decimal (base 10) numeral system with multiplication and addition, although there are also traces of subtraction and, perhaps, division. Ordinal numerals are suppletive for ‘first’ and ‘second’ only. The order of elements under addition is basically descending, except that the units precede the tens. Numerals have both adjectival and nominal properties, with adjectival properties characterizing lower numerals, nominal properties higher numerals – the details are complex. Loanwords are found for higher rather than lower numerals. The data provide interesting confirmation of several proposed universals of numeral systems.

The first part of the paper discusses the interaction of number with gender, animacy, virility and case in Upper and Lower Sorbian as compared with the other Slavic languages. Different rankings of these features are found across Slavic and relative pertinence of the dual number is examined in relation to the rankings of nominal categories. The result of this comparison shows that dual preservation vs. loss cannot be accounted for in terms of these rankings in a straightforward way. The second part of the paper examines semantic and pragmatic properties of dual constructions in Upper Sorbian, which is in the process of losing the dual, in order to establish the conditioning factors of dual preservation vs. loss. It is shown that – apart from bound uses triggered by ‘two’ or ‘both’ – relative resistance to dual loss in Sorbian can be observed in distributive uses which distinguish two-member sets from any other kind of set.

Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage.