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As compared to their contemporary varieties, 18th century Slovene and Kajkavian literary sources exhibit a larger range of relative clause constructions introduced by the interrogative-based pronouns kateri/koteri ‘which’. Systematising this variation promises to add to the debate on the typology of relativisation strategies and relative clause structures, and to allow for a closer understanding of the emergence of the relativising function for kateri/koteri (and cognates). Focusing in particular on the structures that are marginal or even obsolete in the contemporary varieties, the argument put forth in this paper is that in times of a developing literacy with specific needs in terms of content and elaboration, Latin might have served as a model for kateri-/koteri-constructions in 18th century Slovene and Kajkavian. More specifically, authors used language inherent means, i.e., interrogative pronouns of the type ‘which of two’, in new functions to adapt a structure available in Latin such as to meet particular genre-specific purposes. The fact that some of these structures went out of use with the diminishing role of the relevant genres illustrates how literary trends may coin functional and/or structural patterns that might appear marginal at first sight but are actually highly revealing for gaining insight into the processes that drive language contact and change.

UD Gheg Pear Stories (GPS) contains renarrations of Wallace Chafe's Pear Stories video (pearstories.org) by heritage speakers of Gheg Albanian living in Switzerland and speakers from Prishtina.

Slovene naj (coarsely: ‘let; should’) is a highly multifaceted modal element. In the contemporary standard language, it occurs as a modal marker and figures in the formation of periphrastic predicates and complex clauses. With regard to the latter, naj has also been analysed as a clausal complementiser. In order to get a clearer understanding of its potential to contribute to complex clause formation, the present paper traces the development of naj from the earliest sources of the 16th century onwards. Carving out the semantic and syntactic changes underlying the emergence of its remarkable polyfunctionality, the features of ‘non-assertion’ and ‘speaker-attitude’ turn out as central semantic components. Both relate to the original imperative function of naj, which got lost in the course of its development. This semantic bleaching was accompanied by a functional expansion and an accumulation of structural options for naj. Whether these options include the function as a clausal complementiser emerges as an empirical question that needs to be discussed against the more general background of linguistic categorisation.

Telling apart family-internal developments from contact-induced changes and socio-geographically conditioned areal trends is still one of the main challenges in tracing the development – and stability – of languages. Notably prima facie contact phenomena might turn out to have resulted from the interaction of a variety of sources upon closer inspection; assessing their interaction is a crucial requirement for comprehending the dynamics of change. Based on the example of simplification patterns in the system of short personal pronouns observed in the Balkan Slavic dialects located in the territory of North Macedonian and Greece, the present paper illustrates the necessity of identifying the multiplicity of triggers and their interaction, thereby making a case for the relevance of small-scale, transient patterns in understanding diachronic processes. In particular, it places the simplifications within the pronominal system into the larger context of differential object indexing by preverbal pronominal elements in the Balkan languages. With the loss of agreement distinctions on pronouns being characteristic for the last phase in the emergence of object indexing, both processes appear to be closely related. Obviously, in this case, the convergence of various different processes has created a favorable environment for the mutual reinforcement and stabilization of two otherwise highly volatile phenomena.

When speakers of different languages interact, they are likely to influence each other: contact leaves traces in the linguistic record, which in turn can reveal geographical areas of past human interaction and migration. However, other factors may contribute to similarities between languages. Inheritance from a shared ancestral language and universal preference for a linguistic property may both overshadow contact signals. How can we find geographical contact areas in language data, while accounting for the confounding effects of inheritance and universal preference? We present sBayes, an algorithm for Bayesian clustering in the presence of confounding effects. The algorithm learns which similarities are better explained by confounders, and which are due to contact effects. Contact areas are free to take any shape or size, but an explicit geographical prior ensures their spatial coherence. We test sBayes on simulated data and apply it in two case studies to reveal language contact in South America and the Balkans. Our results are supported by findings from previous studies. While we focus on detecting language contact, the method can also be used to uncover other traces of shared history in cultural evolution, and more generally, to reveal latent spatial clusters in the presence of confounders.