Partitivity in Slavic-Romance language contact : The case of Molise Slavic in Italy

Abstract

Molise Slavic is a south Slavic micro-language, spoken in three municipalities in the Italian region of Molise. It has been in a situation of total language contact with Romance varieties for about 500 years, with strong foreign influence on all linguistic levels. This paper is intended as a contribution to two combined fields of linguistics: contact linguistics and the expression of partitivity in Slavic in different settings. The paper opens with a short description of the position of the (morphological) partitive case in Russian, followed by a comparison of the role of case in expressing partitive objects in Russian, Croatian and Molise Slavic. The subsequent section will deal with other means of rendering pure and ablativic partitivity in Italian as the dominant model language and in the Molise Slavic replica, in particular with respect to the similarities and differences in existential constructions. Special attention will be paid to the Italian partitive particle ne and its formal and functional equivalents in Molise Slavic, including the particle na/ne, partitive personal pronouns, quantifiers, the genitive and the role of intonation and word order. Finally we will test various hypotheses about the origin of the particle na/ne, whose formal variation in one of the Molise Slavic dialects causes serious problems for both loanword integration and semantic calquing.