Languages in contact: a contribution to the study of syntactic interference

Abstract

The problem of syntactic interference in the languages in contact has not been much studied or investigated. The present article is an attempt in that direction. It presents the analysis of syntactic interference of American-English (AE) on Croatian (C) spoken in the United States. Some theoretical conclusions are drawn from the analysis of the syntactic interference of these two languages. Since AE is an analytical language and C is a synthetic language we find many instances of syntactic interference. In some cases interference is obviously due to the direct transposition of AE syntactic patterns into C. The examples of the direct interference are: the redundant use of the personal and possessive pronouns, the new syntagmatic order in the pronunciation of a three and four digit numbers, and the extended usage of the verbs with adverbial particles. In other cases the influence is more indirect since the changes are caused by extralinguistic factors as well as linguistic. The examples of indirect interference are the following: the lack of concord In gender, case, and number in the grammatical classes where this distinction is obligatory in Croatian, the disregard of word order where the order is required, and the change of intonational pattern. Finally the rearrangement of the head nouns with its modifiers which is known in some Croatian dialects has been reinforced by the similar AE constructions.