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SUMMARY:The loss of grammatical gender in Cappadocian Greek - Petros Karat
 sareas\, Department of Linguistics
DTSTART:20081027T170000Z
DTEND:20081027T180000Z
UID:TALK14619@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Louise Radok
DESCRIPTION:Cappadocian Greek figures as an extreme case a) of language ch
 ange within the Hellenic branch of Indo-European languages\, and b) of dia
 lectal variation among the Modern Greek dialects in having lost the tripar
 tite grammatical gender distinction into masculine\, feminine and neuter n
 ominals\, a distinction operative in Greek since its earliest recorded sta
 ges. In Cappadocian\, nouns\, whose cognates bear three different gender v
 alues in literally _all_ the other Modern Greek varieties\, behave as neut
 ers in that they combine with the neuter forms of the various determiners 
 and modifiers that agree with them. In this talk\, I argue that this lingu
 istic innovation should not be viewed exclusively as the result of languag
 e contact with Turkish\, as is most commonly assumed in the literature\, b
 ut\, rather\, as the outcome of a series of language-internal analogical l
 evellings of gender mismatches in polydefinite constructions\, a process m
 ost probably accelerated by language contact but certainly not triggered b
 y it.
LOCATION:SR-24\, English Faculty Building
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