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Linguistic Variation: Online-First Articles

Emergence of differential object marking in Asia Minor Greek

A computational approach to language change

ORCID logo | Boğaziçi University
ORCID logo | Boğaziçi University

This paper investigates the emergence of differential object marking (DOM) in the Asia Minor Greek dialect of Pharasa (PhG) under contact with Turkish. We show that DOM in Turkish and PhG are both instances of structural accusative case and DOM can be formally modeled as context sensitive dependent case. We propose that two factors caused the emergence of DOM in PhG, namely (i) case neutralization in indefinite contexts, and (ii) an increase in the number of V-NP idioms borrowed from Turkish where the NP is in bare form. These perturbations led to a significant change in the overall data created by the community resulting in mixed input for the younger generations. Once the amount of bare NPs passed a certain threshold, a divergent grammar became inevitable. We test our proposal using an abductive generalization learning algorithm based on the Tolerance Principle and running a number of simulations. Our simulation results confirm our hypothesis.

Keywords: language contact, language change, mixed input, differential object marking, Tolerance Principle, abductive learning, Asia Minor Greek, Turkish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.DOM in the Greek dialect of Pharasa
  • 3.A comparison of DOM in Turkish and PhG Greek
    • 3.1Features involved in DOM
    • 3.2DOM is structural accusative
  • 4.Accounting for DOM
    • 4.1Nominative, accusative, and dative
    • 4.2Feature relativized dependent case
  • 5.Language change as a learning problem
    • 5.1Triggers for DOM in PhG
      • 5.1.1Cues for the accusative in MG…
      • 5.1.2…and their loss in PhG
      • 5.1.3Calquing from Turkish
    • 5.2Learning DOM in Turkish
      • 5.2.1The learning algorithm
    • 5.3Turkish simulations
      • 5.3.1100-NP simulations
      • 5.3.2Realistic data simulations
    • 5.4PhG simulations
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23019.atl
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