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Linguistics Program Faculty Speaker Series featuring Angela Ralli

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery

Seminar: Linguistics Program Faculty Speaker Series

Angeli Ralli, University of Patras & Princeton

 

Morphology in Contact: Verbal loans in Asia Minor Greek

Abstract:

The purpose of this talk is to present how verbs of the agglutinative Turkish are accommodated in the fusional Aivaliot, Greek-baseAsia Minodialect. With thhelp of thAivaliodata, and in accordance with recenfindings in relevanliterature,it is argued that it is noparticularly difficult foverbs to be borrowed, provided thacertain structuramorphologicaconditionare met. More specifically, Turkish verbs are adapted to the Aivaliomorphologfollowing specificonstraints oGreeword formation, sucas stem-basederivatioand steallomorphy. However, their integration in the recipient language is also conditioned by features innate to the donor. Crucially, the Aivaliot verbal loans present a major challenge to morphology, since they servtshow that morphological issues and approaches can be tested in contact situations, wherlanguages of distinct morphological typologies may affect each other. Moreover, they also render Aivaliot a good candidate as a case study for language-contact considerations by proving that external factors, e.g. full bilingualism, are not the only (or main) reason for an extensive transfer of items and features.