Intonation of Greek–Turkish contact: a real-time diachronic study

Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: a diachronic study

“…The first-generation AMG speech was drawn from archival as well as contemporary field recordings, thus some members of this generation were recorded in their youth, others in their old age. For this generation, the shape of the modeled f 0 curves and the location of peaks and troughs in continuation rise tunes in archival recordings were compared to those in contemporary recordings (see Statistical analysis section and Baltazani et al, [2020] for details of this method). This comparison revealed no significant differences in f 0 shape or in the location of peaks and troughs due to recording date (Baltazani et al, 2020), so all the data on first-generation AMG speakers regardless of the recording date are pooled together in the subsequent analysis.…”

“…H1 (geographic region): based on impressionistic analysis, no differences are expected in the intonation patterns of the continuation rise tune between the regional varieties of Turkish. H2 (diachronic development): based on Baltazani et al (2020), the intonation of AMG speakers is expected to display a mixture of Athenian-like and Turkish-like patterns. In addition, H3: first-generation AMG speakers are expected to make more use of Turkish-like patterns and less use of Athenian-like patterns than the subsequent generations.…”

“…Because there were relatively few archival recordings of first generation AMG speakers, we pooled data from archival recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s and contemporary ones made in the 2000s, having first checked that there were no significant differences between the two types. Baltazani et al (2020) tested the hypothesis that the influence of Turkish would be found to be greater in the archival than in the contemporary recordings. Turkish influence was expected to have diminished in contemporary recordings due to longer contact with Greek (eighty years between 1930 and 2011) and absence of contact with Turkish.…”

“…In this paper, we trace the trajectory of intergenerational prosodic change in four generations of speakers of Asia Minor Greek (AMG). AMG patterns are compared with those of four generations of their Turkish-speaking contemporaries to bring to light any similarities that may have remained after the end of AMG-Turkish contact and four contemporaneous generations of Athenian speakers, since AMG speakers have now been living in Greece for almost a century (see Baltazani, Przedlacka, & Coleman, 2020).…”

“…Our approach differs from those cited above in several respects. First, we make a three-way comparison analyzing benchmark data from Athenian and Turkish in addition to AMG, whereas the papers cited above (with the exception of Baltazani et al, 2020) only analyze data in the contact variety, relying on previously published analyses of the two source languages. Second, we investigate data from four generations, whereas most of the papers cited above use data from just one or two.…”