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From Fusion to Agglutination: The Case of Asia Minor Greek
Author(s) -
Revithiadou Anthi,
Spyropoulos Vassilios,
Markopoulos Giorgos
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12091
Subject(s) - inflection , vowel , agglutinative language , linguistics , markedness , sonority hierarchy , turkish , history , merge (version control) , computer science , morpheme , philosophy , information retrieval
This article examines the nominal inflectional system of a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects (Dawkins [Dawkins, Richard McGillivray, 1910], [Dawkins, Richard McGillivray, 1916]), which developed, in parallel with the fusional inflectional system, an agglutinative one due to language contact with Turkish. We argue that the ‘old’ fusional ending or the theme vowel was reanalyzed as part of the nominal stem. This novel structure was actualized by means of two competing options: in some dialects, the reanalysis was actualized transparently in all inflectional forms rendering an agglutinative pattern of inflection, whereas in dialects with limited agglutination the actualization took the form of a special type of vowel assimilation. More specifically, as part of the nominal stem, the ‘old’ theme vowel signals its merge with the root by allowing it to absorb some or all of its features. Formally, the phonological process is treated as an instance of indirect licensing (Walker 2011), according to which the theme vowel acts as a trigger due to its privileged position as a segment of the categorizer n , i.e. the head of the stem.