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Non-strict negative concord proper and languages in contact. Translating Latin into Croatian Church Slavonic and Greek into Old Church Slavonic

Negative concord proper, as the most common negative concord variety, is the co-occurrence of negative indefinites with predicate negation. Non-strict negative concord proper refers to the word order ruled negative concord: it is obligatory with a postverbal negative pronoun/adverb and optional or not allowed at all with a preverbal negative pronoun/adverb. Croatian Church Slavonic is a nonstrict negative concord proper language. The same goes for Old Church Slavonic and Greek. But Latin, as the source language of many Croatian Church Slavonic texts, does not exhibit negative concord at all. The aim of this paper is to further the analysis of the relation between Latin and Croatian Church Slavonic with respect to non-strict negative concord proper. The analysis was conducted on the first part of the Second Beram breviary, the Croatian Church Slavonic manuscript from the 15th century containing texts translated from Latin or revised according to the Latin source texts. Quantitative data shows that the majority of sentences with a preverbal negative pronoun/ adverb do not exhibit negative concord proper. In comparison, applied negative concord proper is the favoured option in Codex Marianus, an Old Church Slavonic manuscript translated from Greek. These data confirm that the influence of a non-negative concord language (Latin) cannot change the essence of such a distinctive typological parameter like negative concord. It can however, where possible, have an impact on the choice of one of the two equally valid options. In contact linguistics, such a syntactic change is known as narrowing.

syntactic change, negative concord, Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek

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