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Part of
The Continuity of Linguistic Change: Selected papers in honour of Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda
Edited by Matilde Vida-Castro and Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz
[Studies in Language Variation 31] 2024
► pp. 140–163

Chapter 7
Little words, small moves

Clitic placement and syntactic change

| Open University of Cyprus , Cyprus

This paper explores clitic placement in two different varieties of Greek, Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek, and it is argued that, under heavy influence from the standard variety, the Cypriot variety is undergoing change as regards a core property of its syntax, namely the placement of pronominal object clitics, since alongside structures where object clitics appear in second position in the clause, they also tend to appear in the immediately preverbal position, as in Standard Greek, the roofing standard for the Cypriot koine. An overview of existing studies is provided, after which the argument is made for competing grammars; the availability in the Cypriot koine of the Standard Greek as well as the Cypriot clitic placement strategy is accounted for on the basis of successful second dialect acquisition.

Keywords: Cypriot Greek, Standard Greek, clitic, diglossia, diaglossia, koine, interface, bidialectalism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Clitics in Greek
    • 2.1Three types of clitic placement
    • 2.2Exceptional clitic placement
  • 3.Sociolinguistic studies of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek
  • 4.Competing grammars and the nature of the competition
    • 4.1Code-mixing and/or competing grammars?
    • 4.2Approaches to clitic placement in Standard and Cypriot Greek
    • 4.3The Interface Hypothesis
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.31.07tsi
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