Anna Anastassiadis-Syméonidis

Differential processing effects within second group Modern Greek verbs

On-line processing of Greek 2nd group verbs was examined through a psycholinguistic experiment using the masked priming technique. The critical comparison concerned the effect of past tense primes on present tense targets between the two forms of the same verb: 2nd group basic verbs and their alternative forms. Results showed that alternative forms elicit morphological priming whereas basic forms do not, and this cannot be compatible with a decompositional approach. We propose an interpretation based on a lexematic approach within an interactive activation model (IAM, McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). In the discussion, we underline the difficulty in avoiding methodological caveats when transferring logic and material constitution techniques (mostly based on orthographic-phonological criteria) directly from one language to another. The experiment presented here highlights the need to consider a given verbal system in its complexity when designing a psycholinguistic experiment.

Suffixation and the expression of time and space in modern Greek

This paper draws a comparison, through semasiological and onomasiological methods, of three Modern Greek (MG) suffixes -in(os), -iatik(os) and -isi(os), which construct denominal adjectives of time and/or space. Following D. Corbin’s model (1987; 1991 and forthcoming) of Construction Morphology, an in depth analysis of these suffixes’ semantics will be presented. The results suggest that, in order to construct a denominal adjective following the relational Lexeme Construction Rule (LCRREL), a categorical, semantic and pragmatic compatibility are necessary between the base-noun and the suffix, as well as between the suffixed adjective and the noun of the noun phrase (NP); there are no synonyms even if the same noun is used as a base-noun. The three suffixes differ with respect to their semantic and pragmatic features; as a consequence, they are used in different genres. The data has been drawn from many dictionaries and especially from the Reverse Dictionary of Modern Greek (Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, 2002) as well as the Corpus of Greek Texts (Goutsos 2003).