Slavic verbal prefixes in Romani: Forms and functions

The aim of the present study is to identify the extent of Slavic prefixing in various Romani dialects in contact with Slavic languages and to discuss the functions of the prefixes. The central question is whether Slavic aspect, as a grammatical category, has been adopted by any Romani dialects or not. To answer this, 76 data-sets from the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) Database, the existing research literature on individual Romani dialects and, where necessary, an additional text corpus are analysed. The main results are that the data-sets can be assigned to three groups, among which the dialects in contact with Polish and the East Slavic languages use by far the most independent Slavic prefixes. A Slavic aspectual system, however, has so far not been systematically grammaticalized in any Romani dialect.