Ordinea constituenților în grupul nominal din istroromână. Analiză de corpus
The Order of the Constituents in Istro-Romanian Determiner Phrase and Noun Phrase. A Corpus Analysis

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the syntactic configurations of noun phrases (NPs) and determiner phrases (DPs) in Istro-Romanian (hereinafter IR), a severely endangered Eastern Romance variety, with approximately one hundred active speakers left. Building upon what we believe to be a representative corpus – Pușcariu (1906, 1926), Cantemir (1959), Kovačec (1984), Sârbu, Frățilă (1998), added by examples obtained directly pursuant to our field work with the IR communities in Croatia and New York, USA – we will emphasize the main aspects on the word order of the constituents in IR NPs and DPs: (definite) articles, noun+adjective or adjective+noun word order, the position of the genitive against its head, the position of the possessives, the position of prepositional phrases against their (pro)nominal head, as well as a series of predominantly syntactic phenomena (with more focus on interpolation), alongside some notes on the IR information structure, focus/topic, etc. The fact that IR has never been standardized is a challenge, as linguistic data obtained from the informants is very fluid, and IR looks more like a collection of idiolects than a language per se. This work is part of a larger project, called Istro-Romanian and Istro-Romanians. Legacy and Heritage, where the author to this article serves as principal investigator. The general objective of the project is to offer a description of the Istro-Romanian variety as spoken in Croatia and in diaspora, focusing on such key elements as: linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, languages and contact, and multiculturalism. The specific objectives are to make new recordings and create new IR corpora or data banks, to develop a tool with all lexical entries that have not been registered by previous literature, to describe IR word order, as well as to apply a series of linguistics questionnaires (on notions and morphosyntax). These questionnaires will be used to check, for example, to what degree certain Romance syntactic archaisms have been preserved in Istro-Romanian (but are no longer in use on other Romance languages and/or varieties). We believe that new field work will shed more and better light on this disappearing Romance variety. At the same time, the current situation of IR is not to be ignored: it is spoken less and less, the community no longer uses it for day to day conversation, there are no institutions, there is no official status or standardization, with a minor exception, it is not taught in school to children, and, despite the best efforts of local authorities and linguists, little can be actually done to ensure IR a brighter future.

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