FOCUS-AFFECTED (UN)AVAILABILITY OF SCALAR IMPLICATURES

This paper investigates the role of contrastive focus in the process of generating scalar implicatures (SIs) in the interpretation of sentences with the quantifier neki ‘some’ in Serbian. The role of focus has been neglected in the previous research, since most studies insisted on using ‘neutral’ stimuli in experiments on SIs. We hypothesize that the proportional reading of the quantifier, and the scalar implicature, should be facilitated if the proper scalar alternatives are evoked. One strategy to achieve this is to focalize the quantifier, given that focus is a device for evoking alternatives (Rooth 1985, Herburger 2000) – a mechanism characteristic of generating SIs as well (Barner & Bachrarch 2010). In order to test this prediction we performed a series of experiments based on the Truth Value Judgment Task. Adult Serbian speakers (n=27) performed a visual version of the experiment, but we also present preliminary results from our work-in-progress with 7-year old (n=30) and 9-year old children (n=30) who conducted an audio version of experiments. The results suggest that focus does affect the availability of SIs, given that both adults and children tend to interpret the quantifier neki ‘some’ proportionally when it bears contrastive focus (although certain constraints such as partitivity affect the role of focus in adults)

Tendencies in expressing verbal aspect in the Gurbet Romani: pilot experimental study with elementary-school children

The Romani system of tense-aspect-modality categories consists of three dimensions: aspectual (perfective : non-perfective), temporal (remote : non-remote), and modal (the category “intentionality”). Aspect is expressed as an extension to the verb stem: the perfective aspect is marked with a perfective marker added to the stem in order to express a completed event, whereas the absence of perfectivity provides an ongoing perspective (Matras 2001). This paper reports on a pilot study of verbal aspect in the Gurbet variety of Romani spoken by elementary-school children in eastern Serbia (the village of Minićevo, next to the town of Knjaževac). Participants (7 Romani-Serbian bilingual children aged 7 to 10) were shown short non-verbal cartoons from the serial “Die Sendung mit der Maus”. Participants were asked to retell the content of the cartoons and their production was video-recorded and transcribed. The research was conducted in November 2017, and the material is available in the Digital Archive of the Institute for Balkan Studies (Belgrade). The analysis is based on 23 narratives revealing the following tendencies: perfective markers are added to the verb stems to express completed events; ongoing events are typically unmarked for perfectivity; verbs unmarked for perfectivity additionally refer to completed events; Serbian loanverbs, morphologically adapted to Romani, are used to convey the aspect; and perfectivity is additionally achieved by borrowing Serbian prefixes. Although the majority of verbs behave in the expected way in terms of aspect, several exceptions are observed, suggesting that the choice of a verb form (perfective vs. nonperfective) might refer to the temporal dimension of an event, to its iterativity, or moreover be used for the narrative purposes

Distribution of verbal overgeneralizations in the Serbian Corpus of Early Child Language

The study is aimed at exploring the occurrence of innovative verb forms recorded in early spontaneous children’s production of Serbian – a language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. The overgeneralized verbs were retrieved from the corpus of eight children’s production, longitudinally recorded from 1;6 to 4;0, and the developmental patterns of the distribution across age were explored. The analysis shows that overgeneralizations *hoćem ‘want’ 1.sg.pres., *nećem ‘want’ 1.sg.pres., *možem ‘can’ 1.sg.pres. and *bidem ‘be’ 1.sg.pres. are the typical representatives of early overgeneralizations in Serbian. They are typically recorded in all children’s speech samples with relatively high frequency. The overgeneralized *hoćem and *nećem developmentally precede all other overgeneralized verbal forms, but disappear earlier than others. The overgeneralizations of contentive verbs, usually hapaxes, spread later and retain their position long after. The findings are discussed in comparison with the previous findings on overgeneralizations, with particular attention to the developmental patterns they exhibit.Istraživanje je usmereno na pojavu hipergeneralizovanih oblika glagola snimljenih u uzorku spontane dečije produkcije na srpskom jeziku koji se odlikuje bogatom flektivnom i derivacionom morfologijom. Srpski elektronski korpus ranog dečijeg govora sastoji se od trankripata spontane jezičke produkcije osmoro dece longitudinalno snimanih od uzrasta 1;6 do 4;0. Pretraživani su hipergeneralizovani oblici glagola i istraživana je njihova distribucija i razvojna putanja kroz uzraste. Analiza je pokazala da su hipergeneralizovani oblici *hoćem 1.sg.prez., *nećem 1.sg.prez., *možem 1.sg.prez. i *bidem 1.sg.prez najtipičniji predstavnici hipergeneralizacija u ranom dečijeg govoru na srpskom jeziku. Oni se po pravilu registruju kod sve dece i to u relativno visokoj frekvenci. Hiperegeneralizovano *hoćem i *nećem razvojno prethode svim drugim formama hiperegeneralizacija glagola, ali se tokom razvoja ranije gube nego ostali oblici. Hipergeneralizacije nastale od punoznačnih glagola u dečijem govoru se pojavljuju nešto kasnije, obično su niskofrekventne ili hapaksi, ali se u detetovoj spontanoj produkciji zadržavaju dugo tokom razvoja. Nalazi su diskutovani i poređeni sa nalazima ranijih istraživanja, sa posebnim naglaskom na razvojne pravilnosti kroz uzraste

Report on documenting the Gurbet Romani variety in East Serbia and creating the Romani-Serbian dictionary

The paper reports on "Romani-Serbian Dictionary of the Knjaževac Gurbet Variety" (Ćirković & Mirić 2017), which originated from work on the project "Exploring the Language and Folklore of Roma in Knjaževac", financed by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia in two project cycles, 2016 and 2017. The project was spearheaded by the “Njegoš” National Library in Knjaževac. The linguistic team in cooperation with local Roma activists carried out field documentation of the language and folklore tradition of the Roma in Knjaževac and Minićevo. The primary goal was the documentation of Romani language and tradition, the secondary the development and practical implementation of the specific field work methodology. The language material collected was used to compile a Romani-Serbian dictionary with a brief collection of selected texts in Romani

The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics”, Yaron Matras and Anton Tenser eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 596 p.

The paper reviews The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics (Y. Matras & A. tenser, eds.), a valuable interdisciplinary and up-to-date collection of scientific articles on the Romani language and linguistics

Romsko-srpski rečnik knjaževačkog gurbetskog govora

Romsko-srpski rečnik knjaževačkog gurbetskog govora" nastao je kao rezultat lingvističkih, antropološko-lingvističkih i folklorističkih istraživanja na projektu "Jezik,folklor i migracije na Balkanu" (br. 178010, MPNTR), i kao rezultat rada na projektu "Istraživanje jezika i folklora Roma" u Knjaževcu, koji je finansiralo Ministarstvo kulture i informisanja Republike Srbije tokom dva projektna ciklusa 2016. i 2017. godine. Nosilac projekta bila je Narodna biblioteka „Njegoš” u Knjaževcu. Osnovni cilj projekta je bilo terensko dokumentovanje jezika i folklorne tradicije Roma u Knjaževcu i Minićevu, a sekundarni razrada i praktična primena specifične metodologije terenskog rada. Prikupljena jezička građa iskorišćena je za izradu romsko-srpskog rečnika sa kratkom zbirkom odabranih tekstova na romskom jeziku

Digitalizacija jezika i kulture kroz elektronske korpuse: primer timočkih govora

The aim of this paper is to describe the ongoing development of an electronic corpus of the Timok vernacular, a rare example of an oral dialect corpus of the Serbian language. The corpus comprises data relevant for both linguistics and studies of (traditional) culture, and as such it can help bridge the gap currently present between corpus linguistics and digital humanities. The material contained in the corpus is a result of fieldwork research conducted between 2015 and 2017, mainly within the project Protecting the intangible culture of the Timok vernacular. The paper outlines the phases of fieldwork research, in particular the selection of villages and participants, as well as the open-ended interview methodology applied in data collection. The steps in corpus development are presented next: transcription, annotation (part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, normalization), and the resulting search options. In addition, an overview of previous and ongoing studies based on the collected material are provided, capturing the domains of dialectology, Balkan linguistics, socio-, areal and anthropological linguistics, as well as studies of folklore and traditional culture, with suggestions for future research in these domains

Assessing Linguistic Vulnerability and Endangerment in Serbia: A Critical Survey of Methodologies and Outcomes

The paper offers a critical survey of vulnerable and endangered languages and linguistic varieties in Serbia presented in three international inventories: UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages. As the inventories differ widely in terms of assessing the exact level of language endangerment and vulnerability, and lack to provide empirical support for their assessment, the paper provides thorough information from official local sources, relevant studies and the authors’ own field research, when available, on the language categorized as endangered (Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Judezmo, Vojvodina Rusyn, Romani), but also presents additional linguistic varieties which have not been registered yet by any of the mentioned inventories (Megleno-Romanian, Bayash Romanian and Vlach Romanian)

Mother tongue in Serbia: a speakers’ perspective on the meaning of the concept

The present study analyzes the meanings bilingual and multilingual speakers attach to the term mother tongue, a familiar concept which is most often intuitively understood, but difficult to define. Taking as the main frame of reference the vulnerable linguistic communities of Serbia, the authors assess the answers given by the interviewees to the open question “What does the notion of mother tongue mean to you?” asked in the pilot sociolinguistic questionnaire the study is based on. The responses are classified in several categories, which are then analyzed and discussed. The findings show that the speakers give equal importance to the period of language acquisition, in early childhood, and the role of the family in language transmission for defining mother tongue. The diversity of responses obtained in the study suggests that the definitions provided by the censuses, used in the education context, human rights literature, or sociolinguistics, do not necessarily overlap with the social reality, as the actual members of the linguistic communities perceive the concept as being more heterogeneous than generally assumed and do not automatically connect it to mothers