Stavroula Tsiplakou

Language policy and language planning in Cyprus

The aim of this monograph is to provide a detailed account of language policy and language planning in Cyprus. Using both historical and synchronic data and adopting a mixed-methods approach (archival research, ethnographic tools and insights from sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis), this study attempts to trace the origins and the trajectories of language polices in Cyprus and to relate these to issues of ethnicity, community and national identity formation, language maintenance and language shift, as well as the varying constructions of the role of language in education. It will be shown that, while linguistic variation and multilingualism were historically a core feature of the linguistic communities of Cyprus, the end of the anticolonial struggle and the separation of the islands two major linguistic communities post-1974 has helped to establish effectively monolingual language policies, with a strong prioritization of national standard languages as opposed to sociolinguistically stigmatized varieties and minority languages. The monograph will also discuss language moribundity and prospects for potential reversal of language shift.

Cyprus: Language Situation

After a brief overview of the linguistic history of Cyprus, the article presents the major languages/dialects spoken on the island today, namely Cypriot Greek, Cypriot Turkish, Cypriot Arabic, and Armenian. The article is supplemented by tables summarizing the structural properties of the varieties discussed, and by audio files of sentences in Greek and in Turkish Cypriot.

Stylizing Stylization: The Case of "Aigia Fuxia".

This paper examines language stylization in Aigia Fuxia (‘The Fuchsia Goat’), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural ‘self ’ of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of Aigia Fuxia is its consistent pinpointing of its intertextual relations to well-established Cypriot comedic media genres, in which the language and the lifestyle of the ‘rural’ part of the speech community is performed following specific generic and linguistic conventions. Aigia Fuxia dismantles these conventions through the artful deployment of a medley of content, generic, and filmic choices and, crucially, through extreme dialect stylization, ultimately a ‘de-authenticizing’ move, especially as it goes hand-in-hand with other linguistic choices, which are dissonant both in terms of genre and in terms of the series’ baseline stylized dialect register. In this paper we show that such bricolage generates rich interpretive potential: from a filmic perspective, the use of techniques which may befuddle viewer expectations regarding the genre cunningly pinpoint the processes whereby generic and narrative conventions are constructed; from a sociolinguistic perspective, the extreme stylization of the Cypriot Greek dialect may be seen as performative destabilizing of dominant folk linguistic constructs about standard language and dialect in a context of dialect leveling and emergent diglossia resolution.

An A-Binding Asymmetry in Null Subject Languages and Its Significance for Universal Grammar

AN A-BINDING ASYMMETRY IN NULL SUBJECT LANGUAGES AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR Phoevos Panagiotidis Cyprus College Stavroula Tsiplakou University of Cyprus Ishii, Toru. 1997. An asymmetry in the composition of phrase structure and its consequences. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine. Koopman, Hilda, and Dominique Sportiche. 1982. Variables and the Bijection Principle. The Linguistic Review 2:139–160. Mahajan, Anoop. 1990. The A/A-bar distinction and movement theory. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Mahajan, Anoop. 1991. Operator movement, agreement and referentiality. In More papers on wh-movement, ed. by Lisa L.-S. Cheng and Hamida Demirdache, 77–96. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 15. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MITWPL. Pesetsky, David. 1987. Wh-in-situ: Movement and unselective binding. In The representation of (in)definiteness, ed. by Eric Reuland and Alice G. B. ter Meulen, 98–129. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. London: Croom Helm. Richards, Norvin. 2001. Movement in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Runner, Jeffrey. 1994. A specific role for AGR. In Functional projection, ed. by Elena Benedicto and Jeffrey Runner, 153–177. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 17. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA. Safir, Ken. 1984. Multiple variable binding. Linguistic Inquiry 15: 603–638. Saito, Mamoru. 1992. Long distance scrambling in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 1:69–118. Saito, Mamoru. 2003. A derivational approach to the interpretation of scrambling chains. Lingua 113:481–518. Saito, Mamoru, and Naoki Fukui. 1998. Order in phrase structure and movement. Linguistic Inquiry 29:439–474. Torrego, Esther. 1998. The dependencies of objects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.