Vassilios Spyropoulos

Case morphology and word order in second language Turkish: Evidence from Greek learners

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a ‘surface’ problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three experiments have been conducted, a cloze task, a sentence picture matching task and an on-line grammaticality judgement task, in order to investigate case morphology and its interaction with word order constraints. The findings of all three experiments point towards a variable use of case morphology, which is also observed in previous studies of Turkish as a second language (L2). Moreover, they show clearly that the learners face difficulties with non-canonical word orders as well as with the interaction of word order constraints and Case. On the other hand, the learners performed well on verbal inflections. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the developmental patterns in the early stages of L2 acquisition cannot be attributed to a global lack of functional categories but rather to more localized difficulties, which seem to be related to (a) whether the features in the L2 are grammaticalized in the first language and (b) the way these features are encoded in the morphosyntax of the first language. Moreover, we claim that processing factors and the specific properties of the morphological paradigms affect L2 development.

Greek object clitic pronouns: a typological survey of their grammatical properties

In this paper, we review the basic morphosyntactic and phonological properties of object clitic pronouns in Standard Greek. More specifically, we discuss the constraints on the combinatorial properties of clitic clusters and present evidence in support of the out-of-cycle adjunct status of clitic-doubled DP-objects. We then account for the distribution of object clitics with respect to the verb by means of a cliticization movement rule. Finally, we show that there is an asymmetry in the way object clitics are prosodically organized, depending on their position in relation to the verb. Being always a part of the phonological word of their verbal host, enclitics choose to incorporate to it whereas proclitics opt for prosodic adjunction.

From Fusion to Agglutination: The Case of Asia Minor Greek†

This article examines the nominal inflectional system of a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects (Dawkins 1910, 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.