The Morphotactics of the Cypriot Greek Augment

Abstract

This paper adopts a morphological approach to the reduplication of the past-tense augment in Cypriot Greek and explores the morphotactic constraints that apply. Phonological reduplication phenomena have been addressed in morphology by developing a framework that can account for both doubling and metathesis. This phenomenon has been a focus of discussion, but less is known about the application of this mechanism to tense prefixes, known as augments. Doubling of the augment appears in verbal complexes depending on the position of its components, what I will argue are cases that support the post-syntactic morphological doubling and metathesis analysis in Distributed Morphology. The data from this non-standard variety provide a novel analysis of augments and contribute to a better understanding of their distribution by redefining this phenomenon as morphological and supporting a unified framework for the formalism designed to account for similar post-syntactic morphological phenomena.