Watkins' Law and the development of agglutinative inflections in Asia Minor Greek

Abstract

Th is paper interprets the agglutinative infl ection of the copula and passive imperfect in Cappadocian and Bithynian as an adaptation of the Greek to the Turkish infl ection on the basis of the third person singular in accordance with Watkins’ Law. The first and second person plural forms of these agglutinative infl ections add the corresponding Turkish personal suffi xes to the Greek ones in the Cappadocian dialect of Semenderé and the Lycaonian dialect of Sílli. It is argued that the Turkish personal suffi xes have been added because of the superfi cial formal similarity of the Greek ones with the corresponding Turkish temporal suffixes. Th e addition of the Turkish personal suff xes is interpreted as a case of triggered code-switching and hence as a violation of Poplack’s Free Morpheme Constraint.