Abstract
Abstract This article investigates a peculiar pattern of subject case-marking in the Greek of southern Italy. Recent fieldwork with native speakers, coupled with the consultation of some written sources, reveals that, alongside prototypical nominative subjects, Italo-Greek also licenses accusative subjects, despite displaying a predominantly nominative-accusative alignment. Far from being random replacements within a highly attrited grammar, the distribution of these accusative subjects obeys specific structural principles, revealing similarities with historical attestations of the so-called “extended accusative” in early Indo-European. On the basis of these data, Italo-Greek is argued to be undergoing a progressive shift towards an active-stative alignment, a claim supported by additional evidence from auxiliary selection, adverb agreement and sentential word order.
Highlights
Greek has been spoken as an indigenous language in southern Italy since ancient times (Falcone 1973:12-38; Horrocks 1997:304-306; Manolessou 2005:112-21; Ralli 2006:133)
5.4 Interim conclusions In summary, we have observed how within the nominal system the Italo-Greek varieties Griko and Greko present increasing evidence for a progressive shift from a traditional nominative-accusative alignment, in which an extended nominative marks all surface subjects (A, SA, SO) in contrast to the accusative restricted to marking O(bjects), towards an active-stative alignment in which the accusative is extended beyond O(bject) nominals to include SO subjects thereby restricting nominative-marking to just A and SA subjects
The emergence of the so-called extended accusative in Italo-Greek represents just one of several surface reflexes of an original Romance active-stative alignment which, in a process of partial replication, has progressively been extended and adapted in the native grammars of Italo-Greek speakers
Summary
Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Ledgeway, A, Schifano, N & Silvestri, G 2020, 'Changing alignments in the Greek of southern Italy', Journal of Greek Linguistics, vol 20, no. 1, pp. 5-60. https://doi.org/10.1163/15699846-02001003
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