The impact of the ecclesiastical languages Greek Latin and Church Slavonic on the Slavic
standard languages still lacks a systematic analysis in the theoretical framework of contact
linguistics. Based on corpus data this volume offers an account in the light of literacy
language contact i.e. contact between varieties that are used only in a written variant and
only in formal registers. Latin was used as literary language in medieval Slavia Romana Greek
was the source language for Church Slavonic which in turn was the literary language for many
Slavonic speaking communities and thus had an enormous impact on the development of the modern
Slavonic standard languages. The book offers in-depth analyses of the impact of Latin on
pre-Standard Slavonic varieties the influence of Greek on (Old) Church Slavonic and the role
of Church Slavonic as a source language for Old and Modern Russian. The contributions discuss
(morpho)syntactic phenomena such as non-finite clauses relative clauses word order the use
and function of case and tense forms. The volume addresses Slavists General linguists and
scholars of Classical Philology interested in language contact and syntactic issues.
