The Syntax of Grammatical Cases in the Speech of the Bosniaks of Albania

Özet

The syntax of grammatical cases is a highly important yet often insufficiently explored segment within dialectological studies, as dialectology has traditionally been regarded as a linguistic discipline primarily focused on the phonetic-phonological, morphological, and lexical features of speech. For the purposes of this paper, we examined and analyzed the typical functions and meanings of case forms in the speech of the Bosniaks of Albania, who left their native Herzegovina region more than 150 years ago and settled in the villages of Borak and Kodžas near Durres. This paper presents an analysis of the syntactic use of cases in the speech of the Bosniaks of Albania, which represents an enclave of the East Herzegovinian dialect, surrounded on all sides by the Albanian language. The aim of the paper is to describe the basic syntactic structure of the case system in this speech, highlighting its dialectal specificities as manifested in everyday usage. The documented state of this speech variety will be compared to the standard language, as well as to previous syntactic studies of case-related phenomena in Bosnian-Herzegovinian speech types, thus providing insight into the high degree of convergence between this diaspora variety and both the standard language and other Bosnian-Herzegovinian varieties. Consequently, this paper offers an overview of the functioning and meaning of cases used to express spatial, temporal, and other relations, as well as the potential for such meanings to be realized through various case or prepositional-case constructions.