A linguistic analysis of Cypriot Greek-English compound verbs

Abstract

Attested in many language contact situations and characterized as a potential “universal of codeswitching” (Edwards and Gardner-Chloros, 2007:74), bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) remain perplexing constructions for many scholars. Drawing from a dataset of 338 instances, and from a language pair that has never been studied in-depth before, this paper examines Cypriot Greek - English compound verbs. Cypriot Greek is a non-standardized Greek linguistic variety, and the native language of Greek Cypriots living on Cyprus and overseas. These bilingual verbs are comprised of the verb kamno (‘do’), or less occasionally ʝinome (‘become’), and more often than not an English non-finite verb form. This study examines this construction so as to uncover its characteristics and the role that each part in the construction plays; the study shows what kind of formations made with kamno or ʝinome + an English language element have been found in the data, and whether they are all instances of bilingual compound verbs. It also aims to explain how their formation is possible since neither Greek nor English has this construction in monolingual discourse (Gardner-Chloros, 1995), and why BCVs arose in the first place given that Greek has another way to use verbs from other languages. Employing the work of Muysken (2000) and Backus (1996), this study shows that there are four different types of constructions in the data involving the verb kamno or ʝinome and an English element but asserts that only those with the two parts of the construction forming a single predicate should be regarded as BCVs. It is argued that even though the Greek language does not have a construction with kamno or ʝinome and a Greek non-finite verb, the occurrence of BCVs is possible because of a Greek native construction which involves kamno + a Greek derived noun. The study then claims that speakers seem to find English non-finite verbs to be congruent (Sebba, 1998) with the Greek derived noun and use them in its place in the bilingual constructions.