The Dialect of Vlasotince is a Torlak variety of South Slavic spoken in and around the small town of Vlasotince in southern Serbia, between Kosovo (KiM) and Bulgaria. This grammar sketch aims to...Show moreThe Dialect of Vlasotince is a Torlak variety of South Slavic spoken in and around the small town of Vlasotince in southern Serbia, between Kosovo (KiM) and Bulgaria. This grammar sketch aims to provide a succinct description of its phonology, morphology and select syntactic features as currently used by the inhabitants of Vlasotince, supplemented with a small number of texts to illustrate its use in practice. Due to Vlasotince’s considerable growth since the end of WWII (Vukmirović 2013: 106) and the proliferation of media and schooling in the standard language, what is most commonly heard on the street nowadays is a variety with stronger influence from the standard language than is usually found in the works on Torlak dialectology from the past century, yet one that clearly retains much of its distinctive character. It is this contemporary, commonly used register, sprinkled with influences from the standard, that I have tried to describe here. It should serve as a representative snapshot of the way people from Vlasotince speak amongst themselves today.Show less
This thesis studies evidentiality in Linguistic Melanesia. The thesis focuses on the differences and similarities of evidential strategies in a sample of languages spoken throughout the area while...Show moreThis thesis studies evidentiality in Linguistic Melanesia. The thesis focuses on the differences and similarities of evidential strategies in a sample of languages spoken throughout the area while trying to refrain from using a rigid framework in which to place the strategies. This leads to a broad, adjusted definition of evidentiality that allows evidentiality to be seen as a more general strategy for expressing a speaker’s access to certain information, rather than only the grammatical encoding of this. The thesis studies languages from both the Austronesian and Papuan language families and compares each language’s strategy both individually and in context of linguistic and geographical proximity. As this is a typological overview, it is the goal to give an impression of the situation that is as objective as possible. Therefore, generalizations were minimalized and conclusions given or tendencies highlighted only based on the data within this study. Hopefully, this thesis shows that rigid (typological) demarcations of features is not always helpful but can often hamper a deeper understanding and skew typological overviews.Show less
