TWO LEVELS OF THE GRAMMATICAL (= MORPHO-SYNTACTIC) CONTACT-INDUCED CHANGE

The authoress argues that contact-induced morpho-syntactic changes should be discussed and interpreted separately at the functional and at the formal level. She argues that pragmatic and/or semantic changes in every multilingual environment are triggered by the same factors: the need for successful communication between interlocutors speaking different languages and possessing insufficient knowledge of the language of the 'other'. These changes are defined by the universal hierarchy of information needed for successful communication. Referential information enabling identification of the spoken of events and their protagonists comes to the fore. On the other hand, formal changes depend directly of the inherited grammatical structure of the languages in question. In order to prove her thesis she analyses the so-called Balkanisms in Slavic-Balkan languages, i.e. contact-induced changes deriving from the contact with the non-Slavic members of the Balkan 'Sprachbund'.