Diagnosing syntactic effects of language contact and historical transmission: Asia Minor Greek as a key study

We propose a comparative approach to syntactic (micro)variation that enables us to probe and distinguish the two possible sources of syntactic change (i.e. historical and horizontal processes). To this end, we analyze aspects of the nominal syntax in the following Asia Minor Greek varieties: Romeyka Pontic (spoken in the region of Caykara in Turkey), Cappadocian (by the descendants of refugees originally from the village of Mistì) and Pharasiot (spoken by the descendants of refugees originally from the village of Varašós). These languages share a common ancestor and a common sociolinguistic setting: they are spoken in the same broad area, are relatively isolated from the core of the Greek-speaking world, and have been in contact with Turkish, the majority language of the region. We compare them with other Greek varieties, Standard Greek, Turkish, as well as with older stages of Greek. We focus on the surface position of nouns with respect to adnominal arguments and modifiers, and of relative clauses; we present evidence showing the lack of postnominal adjectives in the 3 varieties under investigation, and we provide an account of obligatory “definiteness spreading” with prenominal adjectives in these varieties.