Development of phonemic length alternation in adjectives and possessive pronouns in South Central Romani

Abstract:The paper investigates the development of length alternations in adjectives and possessive pronouns in four geographically distant South Central Romani varieties spoken in Hungary. Phonemic length alternation developed in possessive pronouns, inherited Romani adjectives and some adjectives borrowed prior to contact with Hungarian. The distribution of short and long segments is similar in all four varieties, predominantly exhibiting short segments in attributive position and long segments in predicative position. We suggest that the length alternations have developed from the different discourse pragmatic functions of adjectives in attributive and predicative position: adjectives in attributive position introduce new information on the head noun only while in predicative position they introduce new information into discourse, i.e. they represent the rheme. We also show that possessive pronouns with long segments are used by speakers in attributive position for expressive purposes, leading to the conclusion that some varieties distinguish thematic and rhematic forms of possessives through length alternations.