The Western Periphery of Balkan Slavic in ABLA

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of the lack of a comprehensive synchronic comparative analysis of key linguistic categories and units across territorial dialects on the periphery of the Balkan Slavic area. The aims of the research are to uncover the gradation of Balkanisation in the western periphery and the varying degrees of this processes, to demonstrate the flexibility of the Slavic linguistic type, to establish the influence of inherited linguistic features on the outcomes of contact, and to explore the implicational relationships between linguistic categories.

The research applies approaches from Balkan convergent linguistics, methods of descriptive dialectology, and comparative analysis. The data used in the study includes the Serbian Tuchep dataset and the Balkan Slavic datasets from Vranishte, Trebisht, and Nestorio, created for the ABLA project, along with materials from existing dialectological descriptions and the author’s own fieldwork.

The article presents an analysis at various levels of language structure – lexicon and borrowing, noun phrase, simple clause, verb phrase, complex clause, and phonetics and phonology.