On the historical value of synchronic dialectal variation: lessons from the development of null definite articles in Cappadocian Greek

Abstract

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 of null realisation in terms of case/number and noun class; if Turkish had provided the model for this development, one would expect there not to be an article-like determiner in Cappadocian at all. In contrast, null realisation in the dialect becomes meaningful in the light of other Asia Minor Greek varieties that also show this phenomenon, most notably Pontic and Silliot. e comparative examination of the synchronic distribution of null realisation that varies in the three dialects suggests that its occurrence in Cappadocian is but one of the many reflexes of a significantly early innovation, internal to Asia Minor Greek, whose origins go back to a time before Cappadocian, Pontic and Silliot began developing idiosyncratically.