Watkins' Law and the development of agglutinative inflections in Asia Minor Greek

Abstract

This paper interprets the agglutinative inflection of the copula and passive imperfect in Cappadocian and Bithynian as an adaptation of the Greek to the Turkish inflection on the basis of the third person singular in accordance with Watkins' Law. The first and second person plural forms of these agglutinative inflections add the corresponding Turkish personal suffixes to the Greek ones in the Cappadocian dialect of Semendere and the Lycaonian dialect of Silli. It is argued that the Turkish personal suffixes have been added because of the superficial formal similarity of the Greek ones with the corresponding Turkish temporal suffixes. The addition of the Turkish personal suffixes is interpreted as a case of triggered code-switching and hence as a violation of Poplack's Free Morpheme Constraint.