In this paper, we compare Modern Greek nominal compounds to their Turkish counterparts and reveal that Modern Greek nominal compounds under investigation are morphological while Turkish ones are syntactically built. Based on this, we offer an explanation for the availability of phrasal compounds in Turkish but not in Modern Greek: phrase-level items can be involved in syntactic compounds, but not in morphological compounds involving solely morphological items. The study reveals that the locus of compound formation is not confined to a single module both cross-linguistically and within a language, but the locus of a specific type of compound in a language entails whether or not phrasal compounds with the same compound structure can also occur in that specific language.
It has been claimed that Archaic and Classical Greek had two main types of headed relative clauses: (i) postnominal externally headed relative clauses; and (ii) internally headed relative clauses (Perna 2013a;2013b;Fauconnier 2014;Probert 2015). In this article, we take a closer look at the semantic and syntactic properties of the second category in Post-classical and Early Byzantine Greek (I-VIII AD). Analysing a corpus of documentary texts, we show that a good deal of the examples in this period do not correspond to the established properties of internally headed relative clauses in the history of Greek. This leads us to propose that at least some examples that are apparently internally headed should be revised as a third relative clause type, namely prenominal externally headed relative clauses. We hypothesise that such examples came into existence through form-function reanalysis of internally headed relative clauses, a process which we suggest took place already in the Classical period (V-IV BC). In the last part of our article, we investigate the motivation for the choice of internally headed and prenominal externally headed relative clauses over the postnominal ones: we show that such examples occur strikingly frequently in formal texts such as contracts, petitions and formal letters. We propose that in such texts, internally headed and prenominal externally headed relative clauses, which are syntactically more complex, function as 'transparent signifiers' (Hodge & Kress 1988), serving as a marker of a higher social level. . 6 In this article, we refer to the (nominal) constituent that is semantically shared by both the relative clause and the matrix clause as 'head noun' or simply as 'head'. A number of alternative labels have been chosen in the literature to refer to the same (syntactic) object as 'head (noun)', among which are 'antecedent', 'pivot', or 'domain nominal'. For the purposes of this article, nothing hinges on these terminological differences. 7 With HEAD standing for 'head noun', rel pro for 'relative pronoun', i for 'anaphoric relationship', V for 'verb', and Ø for the gap/presumably deleted constituent at the relativisation site. 8 Compare Fiorentino (2007: 275-6) for this notation. The head noun assumes a grammatical function both within the relative clause, precisely at the relativization site, and outside of it. Very much in line with Fiorentino (2007: 275-6), we assume that this is established with a double anaphoric relationship in the relative clause construction: (i) between the head noun and the relative pronoun; and (ii) between the relative pronoun and a 'deleted' constituent. 530
Recent studies have shown thatcontrary to the traditional view (Dixon 1997: 20)verbs are as equally prone to borrowing as the members of other lexical categories (cf.
In Pharasiot Greek, an Asia Minor Greek dialect, a certain particle copied from Turkish, ki, is employed in a number of seemingly unrelated constructions. Close scrutiny, however, reveals that in each of these constructions, ki is employed as a device geared to influencing the interlocutor’s epistemic vigilance. Based on the Cartographic Approach which defends the syntactization of the interpretive domains, I propose that this unique semantics of ki should be represented in the clause structure. Following recent work which advocates the existence of a pragmatic field—Speech Act Phrase (SAP) in particular—above the CP-layer, where discourse and pragmatic roles are mapped onto syntax, I propose that ki is the overt exponent of SA0 and is further endowed with a [+ sentience] feature indexing the speaker as the sentient mind. The apparent differences between various construction types which involve ki—hence, in which SAP projects—then reduce to whether the [+ sentience] feature on SA0 is checked by an internally or externally merging category in Spec, SAP.
This paper presents an overview of possible cases of conversion in Turkish. I argue that apparent cases of conversion between nouns and adjectives are cases of syntactic transposition, and apparent cases of conversion between nouns/adjectives and verbs are end products of phonological changes in the history of the language, which resulted in pairs of lexemes that are formally identical synchronically, but not historically. This does not mean that no cases of morphological conversion can be traced in the language. I will present two cases of secondary word-class conversion from derived, inflected and uninflected words to toponyms which might be taken as instances of morphological conversion or derivation by zero affixation.
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