Search

Copyright of Antik Tanulmanyok is the property of Akademiai Kiado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

By the term hellenismós the Greeks primarily referred to “Greek-speaking” people, contrasting them with those who spoke “Barbarian” languages. Moreover, hellenismós specifically denoted speaking and, importantly, writing in proficient Greek, adhering to grammatical correctness and stylistic appropriateness. This contribution aims to delve into the definitions of hellenismós by examining its contrasts with other linguistic terms and concepts. Additionally, it explores the issue of dialectal variation from the viewpoint of ancient grammarians, incorporating modern discussions on the status of Greek dialects. Such an approach challenges the notion of a monolithic and unchanging Greek language, as would be inferred from a certain idea of the Byzantine koiné, and scrutinizes the Greeks’ awareness of linguistic variation and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this section, we acknowledge the receipt of recent works on Greek that have come to our editorial attention, and offer a brief characterization of their contents. The cross-linguistic coverage is even broader, however, as Dr. Sampanis examines typologically similar features involving inflected infinitives in Portuguese and Hungarian, and subjunctive complementation in Armenian and Persian. The author also examines the Balkanological context for the developments with the infinitive and the subjunctive, drawing attention to the areal parallels in neighboring languages to the Greek developments. [Extracted from the article]

This summary presents the main findings of my DPhil. thesis, written under the supervision of Andreas Willi at the University of Oxford, on the linguistic relationships (with a particular emphasis on language contact) between Greek and the Anatolian languages between the second millennium and the first half of the first millennium BCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lexicon of Hesychius is still of great importance as far as the exegesis of Classical texts is concerned, but the question of the degree to which it can be considered a reliable source of dialectological data, and especially whether the glosses attest the real state of the vernacular spoken in the different regions of Greece, remains difficult to answer. Nevertheless, the glosses are still one of the most important sources (after epigraphical sources) for our knowledge of dialectal lexical systems and occasionally provide unique attestations of dialect forms in Greek. The following article examines only one such example, namely the regional designation for the "wedding gifts", as attributed to the inhabitants of Lesbos, cf. Hsch. A 1621 ἀθρήματα· δῶρα πεμπόμενα παρὰ τῶν συγγενῶν ταῖς γαμουμέναις παρθένοις παρὰ Λεσβίοις. The article aims to cast some light on this hapax form and concerns itself with the question of a problematic relation to the Homeric form ἀθύρματα. The meaning of the form ἀθρήματα is specialized, it can apply to the sphere of everyday life, and there are also synonyms from other sources which indicate a meaning in the area of "wedding gifts". All of these facts could testify to the dialectal provenance of the Hesychean gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ancient Greek word ἄτερπνος, which is typically translated to mean insomniac or sleepless, and is believed to be from the Greek dialects of Rhegium. Topic discussed include the attribution of the word to Ancient Greek lyric poet Ibycus, the attribution of the word to Greek lyric poet Stesichorus, and the etymological discussion of how the word could otherwise be translated.

In this paper, using new evidence from Pontic Greek (PG) in addition to Standard Modern Greek, we argue that the Person Case Constraint (PCC), generally presumed to be an irreducible morphosyntactic constraint on clitic pronoun combinations and argued by several to provide evidence of feature-driven syntactic operations, is a direct consequence of processing considerations, these new data being inexplicable under any of the current feature-driven analyses (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 2005; Béjar & Rezac 2003; Bianchi 2006; Adger & Harbour 2007; Nevins 2007; Pescarini 2010 among others). Adopting the Dynamic Syntax (DS) perspective of Cann et al. (2005), in which syntax is defined as the monotonic incremental growth of semantic structure, with structural underspecification and update as the core syntactic notion, we argue that the PCC is wholly due to restrictions on tree-growth imposed by the logic of finite trees: that these should underpin observed gaps in possible clitic combinations is due to clitics being calcified reflexes of previously available tree-growth update-sequences whose variability is the source of word order variation. More specifically, we argue that PCC effects, including the problematic PG data, are the consequence of a tree-logic restriction that only one unfixed node can be present in a tree at any stage in the tree growth process. PG, a dialect in which no 3rd person clitic clusters are allowed, provides strong evidence for such a feature-free account. Contrary to current feature-based analyses, which would preclude such data, the analysis presented here is shown to directly predict the Pontic Greek data, thus pointing towards a feature-free account of the PCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the developmental shift of response type through a qualitative study of word associations in Greek. In particular, it tests whether the associations produced by Greek speakers confirm findings of similar studies in other languages with respect to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. To this aim, a translated version of the Kent-Rosanoff test was administered to both adults and children who were native speakers of Greek. The findings of this study do not provide support for the concept of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift, as they indicate a predominance of paradigmatic associations in children's responses and a majority of syntagmatic associations in adults' responses. The paper discusses the concept of the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift and suggests the need for further research in word associations in Greek but also in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vowel dispersion theory supposes that vowels are distributed in vowel space so as to maximise contrasts. Using a sociolinguistic-typological approach, this paper hypothesises that this supposition, while supported by a great deal of evidence in general, may be more true of some language varieties than others. In particular it may be more true of standardised varieties. This suggestion is discussed using evidence from nonstandard dialects of Greek which appear to adhere to vowel dispersion theory less well than Standard Greek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present a dialectal typology of pronominal object clitics in Greek, and claim that clitic positioning can be subject not only to syntactic restrictions but also to prosodic ones. More specifically, on the basis of a cross-dialectal survey, I provide a range of templates, i.e. prosodic patterns which clitics participate in with other constituents of the clause. Furthermore, I show that there is a hierarchy among these templates that ranks them according to their relative well-formedness. The most well-formed templates are found in 2P dialects, in which the exact position of a clitic relies crucially on phonology. This particular claim acquires greater significance when dialects that are in a transition from a 2P to a non-2P system are taken into consideration. These dialects provide valuable evidence for the vital role played by prosodic factors in language change. In light of these cross-dialectal findings, I propose a possible path in the development of non-2P clitics from 2P ones. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper I give an overview of several syntactic and morpho-syntactic phenomena applying to a range of Modern Greek dialects. I present a descriptive account of these phenomena, and refer to some possible theoretical analyses put forward by a number of well-known linguists. In certain cases, I offer evidence for the cross-dialectal occurrence of a phenomenon as a contribution to the establishment of syntactic isoglosses, and report some hints of its diachronic development when the available sources permit. My data are drawn not only from written sources, but also from the oral material that has been collected in the last six years from several Greek areas, and stored in the Modern Greek Dialects Laboratory (MGDL) of the University of Patras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rebut Pappas’s critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]