Investigations in the Bulgarian and Macedonian Nominal Expression

Book excerpt: The current volume addresses issues of micro-parametric variation in the grammar of nominal expressions in Bulgarian and Macedonian, with a special focus on features typically attributed to the Balkan Sprachbund. It is the very first attempt to approach in detail and in parallel the structure of noun phrases in the two languages, to look at how some of these features have evolved historically, to consider the order of phrase-internal modifiers, and possible reasons for deviations from default orderings, as well as the function of items, usually labelled determiners (articles, demonstratives and possessive pronouns). The noun phrase has been selected, as it offers a wealth of phenomena within phrase-internal grammar, at the same time providing insights for, and parallels to, the syntax of clauses. The selection of papers is unique, in that they build on specialised corpora specifically collected for the purposes of work on the current project. The contributors have specialised expertise in the fields of Balkan linguistics, language typology, grammatical theory, (South-)Slavic linguistics, language diachrony, and have written numerous papers published in journals and research volumes. This book reflects work on a larger project entitled "Balkan Morpho-Syntactic Similarities" with a grant from The Norwegian Research Council.