Petros Karatsareas

• Ptychion (Athens), MPhil, PhD (Cantab)
• Lecturer at University of Westminster

Amid the growing trend of preserving ethnic languages within diverse ethnolinguistic communities in Greece and Cyprus, our understanding of heritage language education in these countries remains limited. The chapters in this collection undertake a thoughtful exploration of language education in the world’s two majority-Greek-speaking contexts. The...

The paper that appears in this collective volume reports on findings from an ethnographically-informed study which took place between 2015 and 2017 at a community school founded by an association of Albanian parents in Thessaloniki, Greece. The paper discusses issues of FLP as enacted by parents and children alike focusing on manifestations of agen...

We compare language policing in two educational contexts in England: mainstream schools and complementary schools. We draw on a varied dataset (policy documents, in-class observations, interviews) collected from mainstream schools and Greek complementary schools in London. We find similarities in how the two types of schools control, regulate, moni...

In Cappadocian and Pharasiot, the two main members of the inner Asia Minor Greek dialect group, the head nouns of NPs found in certain syntactic positions are marked with the accusative if the relevant NPs are definite and with the nominative if the NPs are indefinite. This differential case marking ( dcm ) pattern contrasts with all other Modern G...

I explore the ways in which language ideologies are transformed when they are transplanted to diasporic settings as a result of migration. I examine the labelling of Cypriot Greek features as slang by young British-born speakers of Greek Cypriot heritage. Drawing on the analysis of data collected in a Greek complementary school in London, I suggest...

Greek Cypriot education remains largely oriented towards promoting standard language ideologies and only accepts Standard Greek as the language of teaching and learning. • Cypriot Greek, the pupils' home variety, is still seen as an obstacle to academic achievement by teachers and educational authorities. • Cypriot Greek needs to be integrated into...

In this article, I reveal the difficulties faced by heritage language speakers in London’s Greek Cypriot diaspora.

Aim To investigate whether the positive attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek and the mixture of positive and negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek that have been documented in Cyprus are also present in London’s Greek Cypriot community. Approach Unlike previous quantitative works, the study reported in this article was qualitative and aimed...

Space is a fundamental dimension of human life and is pervasive in human experience. Research on space has highlighted the possible asymmetrical nature of spatial relations. Differences in the encoding of goals and sources of motion are a case in point, and cross-linguistic coding tendencies show that path is less frequently flagged by a dedicated...

Call for Papers for a workshop to be held as part of the 13th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, 7 – 9 September 2017, University of Westminster, London

The Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities and the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Westminster are pleased to announce the 13th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, which will be held in London on 7–9 September 2017. ICGL is a biennial meeting, held every two years since 1993, that focuses on all aspects of the l...

The linguistic situation in Greek-speaking Cyprus has been traditionally described as a textbook case of diglossia à la Ferguson (1959) with Standard Modern Greek (SModGr) being labelled as the High variety and Cypriot Greek (CypGr), the regional ModGr variety of Cyprus, being labelled the Low variety (Arvaniti, 2011; Moschonas, 1996). More recentl...

We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero-marking was contextually-dependent on the presence/absence of a prenominal genitive modifyi...

This paper examines the interplay of language-internal continuity and external influence in the cyclical development of the Asia Minor Greek adpositional system. The Modern Greek dialects of Asia Minor inherited an adpositional system of the Late Medieval Greek type whereby secondary adpositions regularly combined with primary adpositions to encode...

Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, to employ mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number and NOM.SG-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type fro...

Lekakou & Szendrői (· · · ), σύμφωνα με την οποία οι πολυορι-στικές δομές είναι ένα είδος ονοματικής επεξήγησης, με την ιδιαιτερότητα ότι περιέχουν δομή ονοματικής απαλοιφής (noun ellipsis). Στην ΚΕ, η υποχρεωτική φύση του φαινομένου μάς οδηγεί στην πρόταση ότι πρόκειται για ένα είδος μορφοσυντακτικής συμφωνίας. Συγκεκριμένα, τα άρθ...

The fact that Goals and Sources of motion behave asymmetrically has drawn sustained interest from numerous linguists who have shown that this asymmetry is not bidirectional. Rather, most studies to date tip the scale in favour of Goal as the dominant member of the contrastive pair Source–Goal (inter alios Ikegami 1987; Lakusta 2005; cf. Gerhke 2008...

We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero marking was contextually-dependent on the presence/absence of an adnominal genitive modifyi...

In the Cappadocian variety of Ulaghátsh, the inherited preposition SE has been lost (Dawkins 1916: 83; Κεσίσογλου 1951: 54). The innovation is found in both Goal- and Place-encoding utterances, and has affected both syntactic contexts in which SE was originally used: as a simple preposition (1), and as the left-occurring member of circumpositions o...

The Cappadocian variety of Ulaghátsh is unique among the Greek-speaking world in having lost the inherited preposition ‘se’. The innovation is found with both locative and allative uses and has af-ected both syntactic contexts in which ‘se’ was originally found, that is, as a simple preposition (1) and as the left-occurring member of circumposition...

In this paper, we take a micro-comparative approach to determiner spreading (DS) in Cappadocian Greek (CG). DS involves the multiple morphosyntactic realization of the definite article in a construction that is semantically monodefinite. In Standard Modern Greek (SMG), DS is optional and has special syntactic and semantic properties vis-à-vis monad...

With this paper, I aim to put prominently into the research agenda of contact linguistics the caveat that structural or typological similarity between two languages that have come in contact with one another in their history may not always be the result of that contact. As a case-in-point, I revisit the oft-cited development of ‘agglutinative’ noun...

In this paper, we examine the apparent lack of gender and number agreement in uses involving quantifying adjectives in present-day spoken Greek such as in (1)–(2): (1) Λίγο ησυχία δεν βλάπτει. (2) …να μαζέψουμε τσάι του βουνού, λίγο φακές… Here, we aim to chart this phenomenon from a synchronic point of view, and to provide a preliminary accou...

Ever since the publication of Thomason and Kaufman’s seminal work on language contact, Cappadocian Greek (henceforth Cappadocian) figures prominently in the linguistics literature as a par excellence example of “heavy borrowing” (1988: 215; see also Winford 2005) in which the effects of contact with Turkish are clearly identifiable on all levels of...

This article challenges the widely held view that a series of pervasive diachronic innovations in Cappadocian Greek owe their development to language contact with Turkish. Placing particular emphasis on its genealogical relationships with the other dialects of Asia Minor, the claim is that language change in Cappadocian is best understood when cons...

In Cappadocian Greek, the nominative singular and plural forms of the non-neuter definite article are realised as null, evidencing a diachronic development that is generally attributed by scholars to the influence of Turkish, which lacks a definite article altogether. Such contact-oriented explanations, however, fail to account for the distribution...

Alongside the syntactic agreement system that it inherited from earlier stages in its history as a Modern Greek (MGr) dialect–according to which targets (articles, adjectives, some numerals, participles, pronouns) agree with the morphologically-assigned gender value of their controllers (masculine, feminine, neuter)—, Pontic Greek exhibits a semant...

In this dissertation, I investigate a number of interrelated developments affecting the morphosyntax of nouns in Cappadocian Greek. I specifically focus on the development of differential object marking, the loss of grammatical gender distinctions, and the neuterisation of noun inflection. My aim is to provide a diachronic account of the innovation...

In this paper, I revisit the synchronic status and the diachronic development of ‘agglutinative’ inflection in Cappadocian Greek. The term refers to the use of the endings -ιου and -ια that are characteristic of the ι-neuter inflectional class, which prototypically contains inanimate nouns such as σπιτ ‘house’ or φτι ‘ear’, to form the genitive sin...

Despite the scarcity of material illustrating the spoken Greek of Asia Minor before the 19th century, there is a consensus in the literature that Asia Minor must have "one time formed a continuous linguistic area". In this paper, I argue that the lack of historical records is counterbalanced by the diversity found among the Modern Greek dialects of...

Cappadocian Greek is an extreme case of language change and dialectal variation among the Modern Greek dialects in having lost the tripartite grammatical gender distinction into masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, a distinction operative in Greek since its earliest recorded stages. In this paper, I argue that this linguistic innovation should...