Sponsor:
German Research Foundation

Duration:
2009 - 2014

Project staff:
Dr Thomas Menzel

Brief description

The subject of this project is the "regular or irregular" formation of inflectional morphological structures in "current" situations of intensive contact between Slavic, i.e. closely related and structurally similar languages. North Slavic languages are considered: Kashubian and Russian-Lemk in contact with Polish in Poland and Belarusian and Ukrainian in contact with Russian in Belarus and Ukraine respectively. Socially, these contacts are asymmetrical with Polish and Russian as the dominant languages. In these cases, there is a high degree of "mixed speech", if not new, mixed varieties. In Belarus and Ukraine, these are very prominent and already have special names: "Trasjanka" and "Suržyk" respectively. Kashubian-Polish and Lemko-Polish mixed speech has so far been ignored. In morphology, there is often "competition" between forms from the respective contact languages with different degrees of regularity/irregularity or morphological "naturalness". The targeted instances of mixed speech as such are not subject to any "conservative" codification and are therefore ideal for the investigation of interlingual morphological equalisation processes in current intensive language contact.

Publications on the topic:

• Publications on the project "Morphological Irregularities"