Coherence ‘in the mix’? Coherence in the face of language shift in Cypriot Greek

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

“…Only female participants were recruited in order to avoid gender effects: previous research that investigated the linguistic production of speakers of Cypriot Greek has identified gender as one relevant factor that affects linguistic performance. More specifically, it has been observed in the relevant literature that male speakers with a particular level of education and degree of familiarity with the researcher show higher rates of use of the Cypriot rather than the standard-like forms (Tsiplakou et al, 2016). …”

“…Given that level of education is also found to play a role in the literature —male speakers that have completed secondary education only produced forms that were less close to the standard according to Tsiplakou et al (2016)— we have included in our sample participants with different levels of education.…”

“…As Tsiplakou et al (2016, p. 11) show, one finds in the linguistic repertoire of Greek Cypriots some “pragmatically and conversationally unexpected switch[es]”, where standard-like proclisis surfaces with verbs that bear phonological characteristics of Cypriot Greek. In (3), for example, two instances of enclisis are followed by an instance of proclisis where the clitic attaches to a verb whose phonological form includes the palatoalveolar fricative [∫] which is specific to the Cypriot Greek repertoire and absent from Standard Greek.…”

“…Although the official language in education and other formal settings is indeed Standard Modern Greek, research has shown the boundaries between the two varieties, Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek, and their distribution across different registers is not straightforward (Grohmann and Leivada, 2012; Tsiplakou et al, 2016). At times mixing is attested without code-switching being in place, while no official characterization has been provided for any of these terms in this specific context.…”

“…Among them, one finds (i) the interference from prescriptive notions of correctness, that is, the outcome of speakers’ awareness that some of the variants of their native linguistic repertoire are considered ‘incorrect’ by speakers of the standard variety, (ii) a greater degree of interspeaker and intraspeaker variation due to non-standardization leading to less clear-cut variants and judgments over variants, and (iii) the unclear dividing lines among the various ‘lects’ (e.g., acrolect, mesolects, basilect) that exist on the standard-dialect continuum (Cheshire and Stein, 1997; Milroy, 2001; Henry, 2005; Papadopoulou et al, 2014). Such features blur the boundaries of grammatical variants in a way that results in a high degree of grammatical hybridity attested in the form of utterances that may incorporate elements from various lects without code-switching being in place (Cornips, 2006; Tsiplakou et al, 2016; Leivada and Grohmann, 2017). 1 In this context, it has been argued that working from corpora of spontaneous speech might be more useful or desirable than using acceptability judgements when the language under investigation is a non-standard/-codified one — as is the case of the variety investigated in this study — because speakers may be influenced by prescriptive notions of correctness (Henry, 2005).…”