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Part of
Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces
Edited by Silvio Cruschina, Adam Ledgeway and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 251] 2019
► pp. 319–355

Syntactic variation across Greek dialects

The case of demonstratives

| Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
| University of York

The syntax of demonstratives in the Greek varieties of southern Italy and more broadly in diaspora Greek can serve as a case study of how long-term unbalanced contact can give rise to syntactic borrowing, shedding light on both necessary and sufficient formal conditions of contact-induced reanalysis and change. Diachronically, Greek features adjective-like demonstratives. In southern Italy and Asia Minor, the adjectival syntax of demonstratives is being and has been lost under pressure from Italo-Romance dialects and Turkish respectively. This radical departure from the traditional Greek pattern is, arguably, impossible in the absence of contact. Crucially, however, a new grammatical rule can only be borrowed if its most characteristic outputs are already possible in the target language, or are made possible through language-internal dynamics.

Keywords: demonstratives, syntactic contact, dialects of southern Italy, Italiot Greek, Asia Minor Greek, polydefiniteness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The dialects
  • 3.Demonstratives across Greek
    • 3.1Standard Greek
    • 3.2Cypriot Greek
    • 3.3Asia Minor Greek
    • 3.4.Italiot Greek
    • 3.5.Summary
  • 4.Patterns of internal variability and the role of contact
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 5 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.251.14gua
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