At the end of 1998, Professor Pieter Muysken was awarded the Spinoza
prize of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NOW) and
set up a research program entitled "Lexicon and Syntax". The
implementation of the Program started in the autumn of 1999 with
research on the lexicon and syntax in a number of areas where contacts
between 1 different languages are intensive. For the languages of many
of the areas selected, basic data had to be collected. For most of the
languages of the Balkan Sprachbund area, however, there are grammars and
dictionaries. Moreover, quite a number of studies of the Balkan Spra-
bund features have been published. Accordingly, when I joined the team
of the Project, I aimed at a description of the state of art in the
field. After several months of research, I realized that Balkanists have
mainly been concerned with compiling lists of similarities and making
parallels between the lexical and grammatical forms of the Balkan
languages, while analyses of the interaction of the Balkan Sprachbund
morpho-syntactic features with other features in the structure of the DP
or the sentence of a given language/dialect are scarce. This oriented me
towards descriptions of Balkan Spra- bund morpho-syntactic features in
the context of individual sub-systems in nine Balkan language to which
they relate - the Slavic languages Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbo-C-
atian; the Romance languages Romanian, Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian;
Albanian; Modern Greek; and the Arli Balkan Romani dialect.
