Complementisers in language contact : The influence of Italian che on South Slavic and Albanian in Molise and beyond

This paper deals with complementisers introducing object clauses, mainly restricted to the complements of verba dicendi. Other clause types and their connectors are added in so far as they are formally connected with the complementisers by means of polysemy or pleonasm in at least one of the languages in contact. As this research is about minority varieties in Italy, or “micro-languages” as we call them, Standard Italian and local Romance dialects serve as dominant or model languages in the contact-induced changes observed in the replica languages. The introduction presents an overview of the actual and historical situation of Italo-Albanian and of the corresponding information on the Slavic micro-languages in Italy. As for the role of complementisers in language contact, section 2 is dedicated to the interplay of the Albanian conjunctions se and qe, both in the Balkan-Albanian Standard and in Italo-Albanian, including their opposition to complementation by means of the subjunctive. Section 3 deals with complementation in two Slavic micro-languages, Molise Slavic in southern and Resian in north-eastern Italy. In doing so, Standard Croatian (or rather the whole range of the Serbo-Croatian continuum) and Standard Slovene serve as points of comparison for a development without direct influence of Italian. Complementation in the Italian model language is discussed as a source for pattern and matter borrowing in both Italo-Albanian and Slavic. In Section 4 the Romance influence in all described alloglottic varieties is compared. The results of our study are presented in chapter 5, including an outlook for further research in other micro-languages in Italy that could confirm or relativize them in terms of grammatical developments in situations of total language contact with the same donor language.publishe