The loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene in the context of the hypothesised Central European convergence area

Abstract

Summary One of the salient morphosyntactic features of the hypothesised Central European convergence area is allegedly a simple three-tense verb system (i. e. past, present, and future) without any formal and semantic distinction between the different past tense forms. The simplification of the originally more complex past tense system has been claimed to be contact-induced, which is mirrored in the loss of synthetic past tense forms in the linguistic history of German and Slavic. The article verifies the hypothesis according to which the loss of the preterit (i. e. a synthetic past tense form) in Upper German caused the disappearance of synthetic past tense forms, i. e. the aorist and the imperfect, in Slavic, more specifically Slovene. First, the process of the loss of the aorist and the imperfect in three medieval Slovene texts is presented, viz. the Freising Fragments (c. 972–1039), the Klagenfurt/Celovec or Rateče Manuscript (2nd half of the 14th century), and the Castelmonte/Stara Gora Manuscript (end of the 15th century). Second, the use of the preterit and the perfect in the Early New High German text Ain newes lied von den kraynneriſchen bauren (c. 1515) from the South Bavarian-Austrian speech territory, more precisely Lower Styria, is analysed. The historical linguistic analysis of the cited Slovene and German linguistic material (the latter originating from the Slovene linguistic area as well) shows that in medieval Slovene the aorist (and most probably the imperfect, too) was lost no later than by the end of the 15th century, while the formal and semantic distinction between the preterit on one hand and the perfect on the other is still preserved in Early New High German documented in the “Slovene-speaking lands” in the second decade of the 16th century. From these facts one cannot but conclude that the loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene could not have been influenced by (the demonstrably later) loss of the preterit in South Bavarian-Austrian German dialects, which were historically (and in some regions still are) in geographical and, consequently, sociolinguistic contact with Slovene.