University of Cambridge

Lecturer in Historical Linguistics, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Thesis Title: A study of Cappadocian Greek nominal morphology from a diachronic and dialectological perspective.

About

I am a Lecturer at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge where I teach historical linguistics, history and varieties of the English language and historical sociolinguistics. My research interests fall mainly within the areas of historical linguistics and morphology with the history of Greek and Modern Greek dialectology, both synchronic and diachronic, being the two areas of my specialised expertise. I am particularly intrigued by dialectal diversity in the Medieval and Modern Greek world, especially in the area of Asia Minor and in other lands that saw intense cultural exchanges between speakers of Greek and Turkish in their history.

I am currently undertaking a postdoctoral project entitled "Survival of the fittest: Documenting Μισ̑ιώτικα, the last surviving Cappadocian Greek variety" . The aim of my project is to document and describe Μισ̑ιώτικα, the last surviving variety of the Cappadocian dialect of Modern Greek that is still spoken in a number of dialect enclaves in various locations in Greece. The first stage of the project, which lasted from March until August 2011, was funded by a Studentship by the British School at Athens. During that period, I collected an extensive body of primary linguistic data on spoken Μισ̑ιώτικα by conducting

(a) archival research in the manuscript collections of the Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects of the Academy of Athens, and of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens; and,

(b) fieldwork in the most important Μισ̑ιώτικα-speaking enclaves in the north of Greece, most notably the villages of Néo Aghionéri (Kilkís Prefecture) and Xirochóri (Thessaloníki Prefecture).

The collected data will be linguistically analysed and annotated in order to produce a new corpus of spoken Μισ̑ώτκα that will be used for the further study and description of the dialect as it is spoken today and before it becomes extinct under the pressure of Standard Modern Greek.

In March 2011, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge. For the purposes of my doctoral research, I studied a set of interrelated developments affecting the morphosyntax of nouns in Cappadocian Greek. I specifically focused on

(a) the development of differential object marking,
(b) the loss of grammatical gender agreement, and
(c) the neuterisation of noun inflection.

All the developments I looked at have the common effect of rendering the morphology and syntax of nouns in Cappadocian more like that of neuters, and have been treated in previous research as instances of contact-induced innovations brought about by the influence of Turkish.

In my dissertation, I revisited these neuterising innovations in Cappadocian Greek and provided an explanatorily adequate account of them from a diachronic and dialectological perspective; that is, I illustrated the course of their development by examining them in comparison with parallel developments attested in the other Modern Greek dialects of Asia Minor—most notably, Pontic, Rumeic, Pharasiot and Silliot Greek.

Within this context, and drawing on a wide range of dialect-internal, cross-dialectal as well as cross-linguistic typological evidence, I argued that language contact with Turkish can be identified as the main cause of change only in the case of differential object marking. On the other hand, with respect to the origins of the most pervasive innovations in gender and noun inflection, I defended the thesis that their origins should be traced back to the common dialectal ancestor of the modern Asia Minor Greek dialects and not in the effect of language contact with Turkish, which is hereby thought of as having played a rather ancillary role in the processes of language change. I further showed that the superficial similarity of these latter innovations’ outcomes to Turkish grammatical structures represents the final stages in a long series of typologically accountable, language-internal developments whose incipient manifestations predate the intensification of Cappadocian Greek–Turkish linguistic exchanges.

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