Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology
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Gaberell Drachman✝
Abstract
The paper discusses how and why meaning variants can arise in words like sin-érxome, sin-gráfo and sin-taksidhévo: sin-érxome has both an idiosyncratic meaning “recover” and a compositional meaning “come with”, while sin-gráfo only has the idiosyncratic meaning “I author” and sin-taksidhévo only has the compositional reading “I co-travel”. In this paper I confine myself to this kind of morpho-semantic variation within Greek, synchronically and, to a limited extent, diachronically. The spectrum of explanations will range from the Saussurian ‘arbitraire’ to folk etymology, to the dichotomy ‘the lexicon vs. the syntax’, and finally to the minimalist ‘only the syntax is generative’. Under the syntacticallyoriented theory of Distributed Morphology (Marantz 2001 etc.), I show how the place of merger for a given affix may vary between affix+root, giving idiosyncratic interpretations (sin-gráfo), and affix+(categorised) stem, giving compositional interpretations (sin-taksidhévo). The paper concludes with a brief extension to meaning change within the same framework.
Abstract
The paper discusses how and why meaning variants can arise in words like sin-érxome, sin-gráfo and sin-taksidhévo: sin-érxome has both an idiosyncratic meaning “recover” and a compositional meaning “come with”, while sin-gráfo only has the idiosyncratic meaning “I author” and sin-taksidhévo only has the compositional reading “I co-travel”. In this paper I confine myself to this kind of morpho-semantic variation within Greek, synchronically and, to a limited extent, diachronically. The spectrum of explanations will range from the Saussurian ‘arbitraire’ to folk etymology, to the dichotomy ‘the lexicon vs. the syntax’, and finally to the minimalist ‘only the syntax is generative’. Under the syntacticallyoriented theory of Distributed Morphology (Marantz 2001 etc.), I show how the place of merger for a given affix may vary between affix+root, giving idiosyncratic interpretations (sin-gráfo), and affix+(categorised) stem, giving compositional interpretations (sin-taksidhévo). The paper concludes with a brief extension to meaning change within the same framework.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
