Morphology meets dialectology: insights from Modern Greek dialects

摘要

The focus of this paper is to discuss the relation between morphology and dialectology. On the one hand, it shows that the study of dialects offers new challenges to morphology, since dialects form an important source of morphological phenomena, and dialectal research allows us to throw light on theoretical morphological issues. On the other hand, it argues that morphological theory may provide accurate and interesting tools for the analysis of dialectal data. In addition, it shows that dialectal morphology can be profitable for typology and historical morphology, because the study of dialects may shed light on possible language structures and language change. The data to be used include examples from several Modern Greek dialects. They refer to coordinative compounding, allomorphy, a borderline case of prefixation and compounding, as well as to a contact-induced change of the morphological type of one particular dialectal system.