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Book Series

Copyright

Ștefania Costea;

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-722-3
Hardback978-1-80511-723-0
PDF978-1-80511-724-7
HTML978-1-80511-726-1
EPUB978-1-80511-725-4

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • CFF
  • CFB
  • 1DZTH
  • 2AD

BISAC

  • LAN009010
  • LAN009060
  • LAN009050

Keywords

  • Romance–Balkan contact
  • Daco‑Romance diachrony
  • Postnominal definite article
  • Future construction WANT + infinitive
  • Language contact typology
  • Head‑initial structure in Balkan sprachbund

    Morphosyntactic Variation and Contact

    A Comparative View from Daco-Romance

    • Ștefania Costea (author)
    FORTHCOMING
    This volume offers an innovative, theoretically grounded exploration of Romance and Balkan linguistics, focusing on areal contact and its role in shaping language change. Drawing on diachronic and synchronic data, the study examines the development of the Daco-Romance nominal and verbal domains, integrating evidence from Latin/Romance and Balkan varieties such as Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Greek.

    Although Daco-Romance varieties—Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian—diverged around the tenth century, their earliest written attestations date only from the late fifteenth century. By applying a comparative Romance–Balkan perspective, Costea reconstructs features of these unattested stages, explaining distinctive traits like postnominal definite articles ('pietrele' vs. Italian 'le pietre') and the Balkan-style future with WANT + infinitive ('voi dormi' vs. Italian 'dormirò'). She argues that strong head-initial tendencies in Dacian Latin, parallel to broader Balkan patterns, underpin these developments.

    A second major focus is the influence of language contact after the varieties’ split, with detailed analyses of interactions with Croatian, Greek, Albanian, and South Slavonic. The study’s comparative approach uncovers both shared patterns and divergences, notably in definite articles and auxiliaries, offering the first holistic account of their diachrony and synchrony. This work fills a significant gap in Romance, Balkan, and contact linguistics, appealing to scholars across multiple linguistic subfields.

    Contributors

    Ștefania Costea

    (author)
    Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Leverhulme-funded project History of the Istro-Romanian Language at University of Oxford

    Dr. Ștefania Costea is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford for the Leverhulme-funded project History of the Istro-Romanian Language (PI: Prof. Martin Maiden). She recently got her PhD from the University of Cambridge (PhD supervisor: Prof. Adam Ledgeway). She has published various articles on the syntax of Daco-Romance varieties and about linguistic contact in prestigious handbook and journals, such as the article in Isogloss entitled “When Moldovan meets Russian: Intralinguistic variation in clitic climbing” and the article in Languages (written with Prof. Adam Ledgeway) entitled “Exploring Microvariation in Verb-Movement Parameters within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance”. Before coming to the UK, Ștefania studied at the University of Bucharest and worked at the ‘Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti’ Institute of Linguistics (Romanian Academy). Her wider research interests include language contact, morphosyntactic microvariation, and diachronic Daco-Romance linguistics.