The emergence of narrativity in Early Neo-Balkan Slavic

Combining a linguistic, philological and narratological perspective, this project aims at a functional description of specific Balkan Slavic morpho-syntactic features the definite article, auxiliary-variation and clitic doubling from a diachronic point of view. While these phenomena have already been investigated quite extensively as regards their structural properties, their functional and pragmatic dimension still lacks a thorough description. The present project aims at closing this research gap, focusing on the correlation between the occurrence of these structures in text documents and the emergence of narrativity in Early Neo-Balkan Slavic. The language of Early Neo-Balkan Slavic texts, i.e. manuscripts dating to the 17th-19th centuries, is characterized by a shift from Church Slavonic towards the vernacular, which is indicated by the increasingly regular and systematic usage of the above mentioned features. The vernacularization goes hand in hand with the emergence of new genres allowing for the introduction of author, narrator and characters as potential anchors of viewpoints. The introduction of viewpoints constitutes one of the main functional aspects of the newly emerging morpho-syntactic features. They thereby serve the construction of narrativity, which is understood here as the explicit linguistic reflection on the relation between narrator and narration. The main question to be investigated pertains to the mechanisms basic to the functional exploitation and pragmatic interpretation of the respective structures in specific contexts. This is possible not on the basis of isolated occurrences of the phenomena in question, but only based on regular patterns of usage. Therefore, one of the central aims consists in getting an overview over possible usage patterns and their dependence on syntactic and thematic contexts. This is achieved by means of a corpus-based analysis, the results of which are compiled and systematized in a data basis. Another essential question pertains to the role of Turkish in the functional exploitation of these structures. Turkish has been recognized as a `catalyst` for the development and systematic usage of the Balkan linguistic features, as well as for the development of common epic topics. What remains to be analyzed is its role in the discourse- pragmatic functionalization of the structures in question on the text level. This is also relevant in order to investigate whether there can be assumed also a common `Balkan narrativity`. In addition to these predominantly linguistic issues, this project contributes to the discussion of `historical narrativity`, which is currently getting into the focus of attention in literary studies. Trying to shape the notion of `narrativity` from a linguistic point of view, it shares research interests with literary studies also on a more general level and provides the basis for interdisciplinary collaboration.

The time span between the 17th and 19th century constitutes an important period in the development of the later literary languages Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian in that is characterised by the increasing usage of the vernacular language in written documents. Philologists tend to regard the language and the textual conventions encountered in these documents as indicating a decay in literacy, literary studies describe this time span as a transitional period between the late medieval tradition and the beginning modern age, while from a linguistic point of view the focus has been on the emergence of Balkan structures, i.e. structures that are typical of the languages of the Balkan sprachbund. Against this background, the present project has taken a slightly different perspective: it was concerned with the functional relevance of these newly emerging structures, aiming at disclosing structural and functional regularities in written texts dating to this period between vanishing traditional norms (Church Slavonic) and gradually emerging new norms (standardization).On the example of perfect-like forms, specific types of embedded clauses, lexical borrowings from Turkish and others it was shown that literary and linguistic development go hand in hand: the changing communicative embedding of literacy enabled the emergence of new genres and the accompanying functionalization of linguistic variance. The various structures investigated in the project share one common feature: they explicitly introduce a narrating instance. This narrating instance becomes typical of specific genres, while it remains irrelevant in others. Comparing texts from different times, texts from different authors as well as different texts comprised within one and the same miscellanies, a correlation between narrative structures and genres, i.e. functional types of texts, could be shown. In addition, the increasing relevance of author and narrating instance points towards further reaching changes in the (self-)perception of the individual. Thereby, the project can be placed into a wider context in the history of ideas which might be reflected also in the arts and other domains of cultural activity. Apart from these immediately project-related results, it has become evident that the (Slavic) Balkans shares a rich literary and linguistic tradition. At least for the period under investigation, commonalities outweigh differences by far the time has come to write a Balkan Slavic history of language, literature and thought. This undertaking can be regarded as an urgent desideratum for further research in this domain.