Numerous Balkan languages/dialects manifest the tendency to omit the complementizer in the future tense construction. The primary aim of our research is to investigate this phenomenon in Timok and Lužnica vernaculars spoken in the Prizren-Timok dialectal area of the Serbian language, from the areal linguistic perspective. The main focus is the complementizer «da» omission in the affirmative form of the future tense, e. g. Će (da) radimo ‘We will work’.
The study sample consists of transcripts of sentences containing the future tense construction (164 examples from Timok and 258 from Lužnica), excerpted from the fieldwork interviews in the Digital Archive of the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, Belgrade. We investigated the correlation between the frequency of sentences in which the complementizer «da» is omitted and the following geographical parameters: Area (Timok; Lužnica), Location (12 from Timok; 4 from Lužnica), and for each location Longitude, Latitude, Altitude, Distance from the Bulgarian border, and Distance from the administrative center. The statistical analysis was performed in SPSS by means of Spearman’s correlation tests.
The results show significant effects of Area (p=.009, rho=-.626), Location (p=.028, rho=-.547), and Latitude (p=.046, rho=-.506), which all indicate a significant difference between Timok and Lužnica areas: speakers in Lužnica (to the south) tend to omit the complementizer «da» more frequently. The influence of other geographical parameters has not been determined. The established differences will be discussed in terms of different historical and sociolinguistic circumstances in which Timok and Lužnica areas developed in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.