Comparative Syntax of Balkan Languages (review)

The languages of the Balkan peninsula (Modern Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian) have long interested linguists because of a set of characteristics shared by this areal group but not necessarily by their nearest genetic relatives, the other Slavic or Romance languages or earlier stages of Greek. These ‘Balkanisms’ include a number of syntactic features, among them replacement of the infinitive by a finite or quasifinite construction introduced by a subjunctive/modal particle; lack of morphological case; relatively ‘free’ constituent order (determined by topic/focus rather than grammatical relations); a suffixal definite article; clitic clusters within both clause and NP; and clitic doubling constructions similar but not identical to those in Western Romance languages. In the last fifteen years, an explosion of generative work on Balkan languages has led to significant results of interest beyond the narrow field of Balkan linguistics, including typological comparisons with non-Balkan languages.

This collection presents a group of papers from a 1996 workshop on Balkan syntax held in conjunction with the Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium in Athens. It is not a survey of Balkan syntax but a fascinating snapshot of several important issues, especially the properties of the infinitive-replacing ‘subjunctive’ construction and the proper treatment of various types of functional heads within the minimalist framework. The volume contains seven articles, an introduction, and two indexes.

The editors’ useful introduction summarizes and lays groundwork for each of the articles, giving overviews of related earlier work, clarifying the theoretical issues involved, and drawing connections to similar phenomena outside the Balkans; for instance, a discussion of finiteness effects in Romance nicely leads into several papers on the Balkan infinitive-replacing construction, showing why the construction is problematic for finiteness-based accounts. This unusually meaty introduction will be especially appreciated by students, general linguists, typologists, and others who are not Balkan specialists.

Following the introduction is a broadly philosophical article by Brian Joseph, ‘Is Balkan comparative syntax possible?’. This seems like an odd question, as he notes himself, in a collection of papers on Balkan comparative syntax. It turns out Joseph makes a distinction between ‘comparative Balkan syntax’ and ‘comparative syntax of the Balkan languages’, the former concerned with the evolution of unique syntactic features of the Balkan Sprachbund through intensive language contact, the latter with typological features of Balkan languages regardless of their history or geographical restriction. All the other papers in the volume (like most recent work in Balkan linguistics) are of the second, broadly comparative, type which Joseph appears to regard with some unease, repeatedly using terms like ‘problematic’ for studies of the syntax of Balkan languages not directly rooted in language contact and approving labels like ‘true comparative Balkan syntax’ for those which are so rooted. However, he does concede that both approaches are valid (though with different aims) and provides interesting case studies of Balkan negation from both points of view. A study of the parallel range of functions of negation markers with m-, with emphasis on how this parallelism arose through calquing in a context of widespread imperfect bilingualism, illustrates ‘comparative Balkan syntax’. A study of the fusing of negative particles with verbs, a process which occurs in several Balkan languages but also in many non-Balkan ones, illustrates ‘comparative syntax of the Balkan languages’.

The remaining articles each deal with a specific issue or construction in at least two Balkan languages, often with reference to languages outside the Balkans as well. Three chapters form a closely related group—Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, ‘Head-to-head merge in Balkan subjunctives and locality’; Anna Roussou, ‘Control and raising in and out of subjunctive complements’; and Iliyana Krapova, ‘Subjunctives in Bulgarian and Modern Greek’—all taking a minimalist approach to the Balkan infinitive-replacing construction. I found this the most worthwhile part of the book, partly because the...