Conference Presentations by Giorgos Markopoulos
⤷ to investigate at a cross-linguistic level the variable realization of certain phonological seg... more ⤷ to investigate at a cross-linguistic level the variable realization of certain phonological segments that seems to be motivated by register. ⤷ to provide an account of this behavior by adopting a grammatical model capable of integrating pragmatic factors into the phonological processing.
• To account for cross-linguistic allomorphic patterns by developing a unifying theoretical model... more • To account for cross-linguistic allomorphic patterns by developing a unifying theoretical model that approaches allomorphy both from a phonological and a morphosyntactic perspective • To highlight the common morphosyntactic properties and the common phonological behavior nouns from different languages display
PhD Thesis by Giorgos Markopoulos
Papers by Giorgos Markopoulos
The Linguistic Review, 2019
In this article we examine patterns of root allomorphy in Greek that involve vowel alternations a... more In this article we examine patterns of root allomorphy in Greek that involve vowel alternations and propose aGeneralized Non-linear Affixation(Bermúdez-Otero 2012) analysis according to which these alternations result from the competition between segments that belong, on the one hand, to the vocabulary items of roots and, on the other, to the exponents of functional heads (Voice/Aspect,n). More specifically, we claim that phonological entities have agradientdegree of presence in a structure, that is, are specified with a certain activation strength value underlyingly (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016). As a result, the surface realization of roots is determined by the relevant activation level of the exponents of functional heads they are eventually combined with. From all available exponents, the one that optimally complements the strength value of the vocabulary item of a given root will eventually surface. Our analysis is shown to be theoretically advantageous because it develops a st...
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2016
This article examines the nominal inflectional system of a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects (Da... more This article examines the nominal inflectional system of a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects (Dawkins 1910, 1916), which developed, in parallel with the fusional inflectional system, an agglutinative one due to language contact with Turkish. We argue that the 'old' fusional ending or the theme vowel was reanalyzed as part of the nominal stem. This novel structure was actualized by means of two competing options: in some dialects, the reanalysis was actualized transparently in all inflectional forms rendering an agglutinative pattern of inflection, whereas in dialects with limited agglutination the actualization took the form of a special type of vowel assimilation. More specifically, as part of the nominal stem, the 'old' theme vowel signals its merge with the root by allowing it to absorb some or all of its features. Formally, the phonological process is treated as an instance of INDIRECT LICENSING (Walker 2011), according to which the theme vowel acts as a trigger due to its privileged position as a segment of the categorizer n, i.e. the head of the stem.
Στο άρθρο αυτό eξeτάζονται φαινόμeνα αλλομορφίας που παρατηρούνται στην ονοματική κλίση της Eλλην... more Στο άρθρο αυτό eξeτάζονται φαινόμeνα αλλομορφίας που παρατηρούνται στην ονοματική κλίση της Eλληνικής και της Eβραϊκής. Αντίθeτα από τις υπάρχουσeς αναλύσeις, οι οποίeς προσeγγίζουν την αλλομορφία eίτe αποκλeιστικά από μορφοσυντακτική σκοπιά eίτe eστιάζοντας μόνο στις φωνολογικές πτυχές της, στην παρούσα ανάλυση αναδeικνύονται αξιοσημeίωτeς γeνικeύσeις που αφορούν το διeπίπeδο φωνολογίας-μορφοσύνταξης-σημασιολογίας. Για τη συνδυαστική αυτή προσέγγιση αξιοποιούνται τα μοντέλα της Κατανeμημένης Μορφολογίας ( Halle and Marantz 1993) και της Διαβαθμισμένης Αρμονικής Γραμματικής ( Smolensky and Goldrick 2016).
Catalan Journal of Linguistics
The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of li... more The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of linguistic elements and the criteria used for identifying prosodic structures. Our focus is on final coronal nasals in function words in Greek and the variability in their patterns of realization before lexical words. Certain nasals coalesce before stops and delete before fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split in the behavior of nasals does not pertain to item-specific prosody because the relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from the contrastive activity level of nasals in underlying forms in the spirit of Smolensky & Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; nasals with lower activity coalesce and delete in the respective phonological environments, whereas those with higher activity do not. We show that the proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects that alternati...
The Linguistic Review
This work investigates and compares nominal expressive suffixes in Russian and Greek within the f... more This work investigates and compares nominal expressive suffixes in Russian and Greek within the framework of Distributed Morphology. It shows that, although the suffixes under investigation share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. More specifically, in both languages expressive suffixes can attach either as heads or as modifiers and, furthermore, they may occupy various syntactic positions. This illustrates that, despite their uniformity at semantic level, expressive suffixes exhibit variation with respect to their syntactic structuring both within and across languages.
We examine a vowel assimilation process attested in a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects which su... more We examine a vowel assimilation process attested in a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects which superficially looks like vowel harmony. We propose, however, that vowel assimilation is actually a feature spreading process actualizing a reanalysis in the nominal inflection, which was facilitated by the language contact with Turkish. More specifically, it signals a ‘new’ stem formation, in which the theme vowel of the ending or the whole ending loses its status as a constituent and incorporates into the stem. Vowel assimilation is not attested in agglutinative inflection because in this case the ‘new’ status of the theme vowel or of the old ending as part of the stem is morphologically transparent.
48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, 2018
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Conference Presentations by Giorgos Markopoulos
PhD Thesis by Giorgos Markopoulos
Papers by Giorgos Markopoulos