Phonological processes in Stand. Albanian verb conjugation

Verb conjugation in Standard Albanian is very complex, comparable in some ways to languages like Latin. An Albanian verb form often consists of a root and an ending, such as in trego+ni you tell, with trego- the root, and -ni the ending for the plural 2nd person. But for many verbs, there are many different forms that the root can take, such as ndjek you chase in the present or ndiq chase! in the imperative, where je is replaced with i, and the final consonant k is replaced with a different Albanian consonant q. Such changes in the verb root are similar to English changes between sleep and slept. But the overall system of such changes in the root is far more pronounced in Albanian. Furthermore, in addition to root changes, other special phenomena may occur at the boundary between the root and the ending: for example, when the root ends in a vowel and is followed by an ending also beginning with a vowel, the resulting two-vowel sequence is not allowed in Albanian, just as it is the case in many other languages, and special sound changes occur. So far, in the existing Albanian grammars and textbooks only the description of such changes across the conjugation of the Albanian verb can be found. This is because, in general, the intention of those works is practical: it is to define what should be considered as correct or standard use of the Standard Albanian grammar, not to achieve a deeper scientific understanding. In contrast, in this project the co-investigators Adelina Zenunaj and Igor Yanovich try to find out the reasons why the Albanian verb forms look the way they look and what the factors are that shape them. For example, with the changes as in ndjek ~ ndiq, we will try to identify the factors holding for a given verb form that determine which changes actually take place. It could be, for instance, that the presence of a given consonant in some verb tenses causes a change in the vowel of the root; or it could be that a difference between different vowels within the root triggers or blocks the change of the root-final consonant. Overall, the goal is to not just describe the system of Standard Albanian verb inflection, but also to advance our scientific understanding of that language, uncovering the systematic sound processes that create the complex system of changes as in ndjek ~ ndiq.