This paper examines the adversative discourse markers ама and ами in Macedonian in order to shed light on the interdependence of typology and convergence. Macedonian is typically located in the center of the Balkan Sprachbund. At the same time, a comparison of these two particular discourse markers in Macedonian and Bulgarian, both Balkan Slavic languages, demonstrates that a simplistic application of the criterion of Turkish borrowings would suggest that Bulgarian be considered the more central member of the Balkan Sprachbund. What the following discussion will reveal, however, is that the source of borrowing (i.e. Turkish versus Greek) is not as important as the actual fact of borrowing, i.e. the intensity of multilingual contact, for the determination of centrality.
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