The impact of language contact on focus realization in Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish

This study investigates focus-induced word-order variation in two groups of informants from Bulgaria: bilingual speakers of Bulgarian (BG) and the critically endangered minority language Judeo-Spanish (BJS), and monolingual speakers of BG. Based on semi-spontaneous data collected as part of an elicited production task, it is shown that the two languages largely pattern together in preferring the signalling of focus in situ via prosodic means, although syntactic strategies such as p-movement, focus fronting, and dislocations are used to a minor extent. Clefting only occurs in the BJS data. Furthermore, the syntax of BJS shows linear orderings of constituents that are ungrammatical in Mainstream Spanish and strongly point to cross-linguistic influence from BG. The study thus presents further evidence for the instability of interface phenomena such as the realization of information structure in language contact and hence supports the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011, Chamorro & Sorace 2019).