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This paper presents an empirical study on the cross-linguistic influence of contact languages (Turkish, Georgian and Russian) in the domain of grammatical gender in Pontic Greek spoken by the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The study is based on corpus data collected during several periods of fieldwork within the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The questions addressed in the paper are: What innovations can be observed in the understudied variety in the gender domain, and, if any innovation is observed, are they due to the impact of contact languages? I argue that contact-induced changes in the gender domain manifest themselves in the assignment of gender to loan nouns, and contribute to the establishment of the default gender value. The main findings reveal that, in comparison with other Pontic varieties, this variety is on the one hand more sensitive to the animacy hierarchy, and, on the other, shows increased use of the feminine gender as a result of the incorporation of feminine loans from a gendered language, i.e., Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirical study on morphological integration of borrowed nouns in Pontic Greek. The data have been elicited from a corpus drawn from original fieldwork in Georgia. The aim of the paper was to identify whether there was an advantage associated with borrowing between languages of the same morphological type, i. e. non-concatenative (Russian) to non-concatenative (Pontic Greek). However, the research revealed that the phonological form of the loanword is decisive for the integration of Russian and Turkish nouns into PG, and not the morphological type. Additionally, we discuss some strategies of transfer which reveal the interaction between languages of different morphological types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]