Lexical Borrowing Bearing Witness to the Notions of Gender and Inflection Class: A Case Study on Two Contact Induced Systems of Greek

Abstract

This paper provides a comparative analysis of nominal loanword integration in two different contact induced systems of Greek (i.e. Grico and Capapadocian) in order to offer further insights into two major grammatical categories, those of inflection class and gender (from a morpho-semantic viewpoint, i.e. gender assignment). By providing an analysis of the general mechanisms (e.g. natural gender, formal correspondences, semantic equivalences, analogy) which account for the integration of loanwords in the examined systems it is shown that notwithstanding the divergence, grammatical gender splits into its two major primitives, the semantic one relating to sex and animacy and the structural one, i.e. as an inflectional classifier-in correlation with the notion of inflection class-in the organization of nominal classification types, offering further support to the claim that gender is not a purely morphological or a purely semantic category, but a combination of the two. Each one of the two different facets of grammatical gender along with the notion of inflection class conjoins the need of the systems to provide some type of classification in nouns. However, the realization of those two facets, of one, or none of them, is subject to parametric variation depending, especially in contact induced varieties, on the interplay between the grammatical properties of all the involved systems (i.e. system compatibility, simplification phenomena). The present study is a contribution to the overall language contact studies as well as to the studies on grammatical gender and inflection class and their role in the organization of grammar, emphasizing the role of loanwords in revealing aspects of this organization.

Greek-Canadian Koiné: The Emergence of a Koiné among Greek-Canadian Immigrants

“…With respect to the borrowing of nouns, we find a rich system of accommodation. This is not surprising since, according to Thomason and Kaufman (1988), when a language has rich morphology, it tends to morphologically adapt loan words to its system (see also Melissaropoulou 2013 for contact phenomena specific to Greek). We find very few examples that are kept invariable in CG as far as their morphological form is concerned.…”

Agglutinative Noun Inflection in Cappadocian

“…This secondary genitive ending is found at Delmeso, the "least corrupt" of the North Cappadocian dialects according to Dawkins (1916: 94), exclusively in the inflection of xerífos, which is borrowed from Turkish herif and identical in meaning with áθropos. Quite naturally, then, xerífos is integrated in the inflectional class of the inherited masculine nouns in -os, more specifically in Karatsareas' IC1a (2016: 44), because it has the semantic properties [human] and [male] (Melissaropoulou 2013(Melissaropoulou : 372, 2016Karatsareas 2016: 49). It should be noted that xerífos at Delmeso does not follow the inherited inflection in the genitive singular and accusative plural and that the indefinite accusative is not attested according to Dawkins (which does not necessarily mean that these inflections did not exist)…”

Modeling Syntactic Change under Contact: The Case of Italiot Greek

“…For recent investigation of the mechanisms of lexical borrowing and morphological integration in the Greek of Southern Italy, see at leastMelissaropoulou (2013Melissaropoulou ( , 2017;Ralli (2019) and Manolessou and Ralli (2020).…”