Slavic on the language map of Europe: Historical and areal-typological dimensions ed. by Andrii Danylenko and Motoki Nomachi (review)

This book is largely based on the papers presented at the International symposium Slavic on the Language Map of Europe, held in 2013 at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University in Sapporo (Japan), a renowned center for Slavic studies that promotes international cooperation in the field of linguistics. Besides the introductory article by Andrii Danylenko, “Searching for a place of Slavic in Europe as a linguistic area” (1‒17), it consists of 14 contributions, grouped into three parts: “Issues in methodology and pre-history” (19‒110), “Slavic and Standard Average European” (111‒258), and “Slavic in areal groupings in Europe” (259‒489), followed by an Index of subjects (491‒94) and an Index of languages (495‒98).

Part I encompasses three chapters. In “Matrëška and areal clusters involving varieties of Slavic: On methodology and data treatment” (21‒61), Björn Wiemer questions not only the notion of Slavic (“What does ‘Slavic’ (type) mean?”), but the very notion of taxonomies, definitions of areal clines, hot-beds of diffusion, and language types, raising an important question: what if we change the criteria (feature clusters) that underlie them? Examining several case studies (resultatives and related constructions, reflexive-reciprocal polysemy, etc.), Wiemer shows that the diversification of Slavic varieties is a result of language contacts that promote minor usage patterns and points out that the inclusion of diastratic diversification (often neglected in discussions not only of Slavic but of Standard Average European (SAE) features as well) shows that Slavic is by no means “a monolithic or easily definable notion”. By doing so, the study also brings into question the Sapirian notion of drift.

“Common Slavic in the light of language contact and areal linguistics: Issues of methodology and the history of research” by Vít Boček (63‒86) deals with areal linguistics, language contact studies, and diachronic linguistics. The author presents three approaches to language contacts in historical-comparative linguistics: conventional (the main role in language development is played by language divergence and no role or a minor role for language convergence), revisionist (divergence and convergence balanced), and revolutionary (mainly language convergence). He presents the application of these approaches to the analysis of contacts between Common Slavic and early Romance dialects, emphasizing that these contacts, which involve some convergent phonological features, are not a matter of source language and target language but rather of “mutual reinforcement”.

In “Intertwining trees, eddies, and tentacles—some thoughts on linguistic relationships in Europe, mainly Slavic-non-Slavic” (87‒110), Robert Orr first presents a complex historical picture of multi-level linguistic relations in Europe, including non-Indo-European families such as Old European, Hamito-Semitic, and Uralic. Focusing on SAE, he points out, following Isačenko, that an important aspect in the study of the SAE languages is their division into have-languages and be-languages. He further discusses family trees, the center-periphery relation, substratum theories, “linguistic rings”, and Hungarian.

Part II opens with a contribution by Jadranka Gvozdanović, “Standard Average European revisited in the light of Slavic evidence” (113‒44). She examines several grammatical properties of SAE in light of Slavic data: the article, relative clauses, possession, and the habeo-perfect. She shows that these changes were slow and some were “adaptive changes that do not really modify the system”. For example, while Bulgarian and Macedonian as members of the Balkan Sprachbund developed articles, language contact led to the increased use of demonstrative pronouns in Czech, Polish, Sorbian due to German influence. Finally, Gvozdanović elaborating on the historical dimension of SAE argues that its origins are likely to be older than usually presumed since some of the SAE features are attested earlier and have wider distribution (e.g., relative clauses with relative pronouns). Although these features, as she argues, could have been based on the common Indo-European ancestry of the...