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, a Greek-based Asia Minor dialect. With the help of the Aivaliot data, and in accordance with recent findings in relevant literature,it is argued that it is not particularly difficult for verbs to be borrowed, provided that certain structural / morphological conditions are met. More specifically, Turkish verbs are adapted to the Aivaliot morphology following specific constraints of Greek word formation, such as stem-based derivation and stem allomorphy. 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 serve to show that morphological issues and approaches can be tested in contact situations, where languages 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.