Řečtina v jazykových svazech: historiografické a metodologické poznámky

Abstract

From the perspective of areal linguistics, Modern Greek, along with several other languages, is specific in that its involvement in three linguistic areas is being considered: the Balkan, European and Mediterranean. However, these three research areas differ in the length of the research tradition, the degree of both the theoretical elaboration and the descriptive and interpretative work carried out, and consequently in the power of their statements. This paper aims to briefly summarize and critically assess the history of research on Greek from these three perspectives, including the mutual intersections between the three linguistic areas (sections 1 and 2). Placing these research areas side by side and comparing them allows us to better understand the methodological problems faced by areal linguistics. Some of these (the synchronic vs diachronic view, the number of features constituting a linguistic area and their different explanatory value, centre vs periphery approach) are pointed out in section 3 in the discussion of the new way of modelling and visualizing linguistic areas (maps of isoglosses and isopleths) that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. After discussing these questions, together with an examination of the place that Greek occupies in the mentioned linguistic areas, we conclude in section 4 by suggesting the method of research that we consider to be the most promising at present in areal linguistics. This is the classification of features in linguistic areas based on three dimensions: 1) the diachronic dimension, 2) the synchronic dimension (tracking the synchronic dynamics of the phenomenon under investigation), 3) the stratification dimension (not only standard but also nonstandard/colloquial/territorial varieties should be investigated). We consider Seiler's (2019) model to be the best approach in this regard so far since it comes up with a classification of Standard Average European (SAE) features in a particular language into certain types based on the three dimensions mentioned above. Our ambition is to show the necessity of such a more fi ne-grained analysis also for Greek in Standard Average European.