Abstract
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 spatial region. Secondary adpositions could originally precede simple adpositions ([preposition + preposition + NP ACC ]) or follow the adpositional complement ([preposition + NP ACC + postposition]). Asia Minor Greek replicated the structure of Ottoman Turkish postpositional phrases to resolve this variability, fixing the position of secondary adpositions after the complement and thus developing circumpositions of the type [preposition + NP ACC + postposition]. Later, some varieties dropped the primary preposition se from circumpositional phrases, leaving (secondary) postpositions as the only overt relator ([NP ACC + postposition]) in some environments. In addition, a number of Turkish postpositions were borrowed wholesale, thus enriching the Greek adpositional inventory.
Highlights
Consider the following diachronic scenario: at some point in its history, a linguistic element loses part of its phonological, semantic and functional content
This dialect completes the Asia Minor Greek adpositional cycle with Stage v, in which spatial region is single-marked by postpositions (Figure 3)
The available data do not allow us to conclude safely whether the choice of preposition is conditioned by the system that Asia Minor Greek inherited from Late Medieval Greek or by carrying over the properties of Ottoman Turkish postpositions, as, in most cases, the prepositions that we find in the texts satisfy karatsareas the combinatorial requirements of both the model and the recipient languages
Summary
Consider the following diachronic scenario: at some point in its history, a linguistic element loses part of its phonological, semantic and functional content. She admits that most of the elements found in Pashto circumpositions may function independently as prepositions or postpositions, but a number of them cannot do so These can only combine with other adpositions to form circumpositional phrases in order to express specific meanings and govern single complements. Due to developments that affected their semantic content in earlier stages of the language, Late Medieval Greek prepositions can only be used to encode abstract spatial relations and are not able to express specific spatial region. In terms of the the adpositional cycle, Late Medieval Greek illustrates the regularisation of the use of ambipositions to reinforce prepositions that have lost part of their ability to encode spatial region This is not possible in the case of bare postpositions whose pronominal complements always need to be overtly expressed (7c)
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