Tracking the Onset of Language Change: The Actuation of Case Syncretism in the Balkan Convergence Area

Objective

All languages change over time, but despite over two centuries of systematic scientific study of language change, there is still no theoretically satisfying explanation as to why and how particular change happens in a certain language at a certain point in time, which is known as the Actuation problem in historical linguistics. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship TRACES investigates the role of internal and external factors in solving the Actuation problem, by looking at a structural change in case systems of four Indo-European branches (Albanian, Greek, Balkan Romance, and Balkan Slavic) that have converged as a result of prolonged historical contact affecting their nominal morphosyntax. Namely, all four branches constituting the Balkan convergence area have preserved or developed innovative definiteness marking on nouns while, in turn, having lost or significantly reduced the inventory of inherited morphological case forms in systemic, parallel ways, thus exhibiting case syncretism. Building on one of the most exciting findings in the recent theoretical literature, that case syncretism patterns can be modelled by reference to a single Case hierarchy, TRACES combines insights from a decompositional approach to case, within the theoretical framework of Nanosyntax, with geolinguistic tools and methods, using rich empirical data from the Balkans, in order to reconstruct the factors behind this contact-induced structural change and, for the first time, provide a theoretically grounded explanation for the Actuation problem. In turn, the theory, which is still by large synchronically oriented, will be enriched with an explicit formal diachronic account, based on a novel corpus of underrepresented data, including some of the empirical data that is challenging for the existing theory.