Gender, definiteness and word order in Ulağaç Cappadocian

Mark Janse1 & Eline Daveloose2

Ghent University1, 2, Harvard University1

Of all the Cappadocian dialects, Ulağaç Cappadocian is considered the most ‘corrupt’ by Dawkins (1916: 18): “Nowhere is the vocabulary so filled with Turkish words or the syntax so Turkish”. Kesisoglou singles out the following as being characteristic: the loss of grammatical gender distinctions and the resulting neuterisation of nouns, including the generalized use of the neuter article do, pl. da (Κεσίσογλου 1951: 4). In the case of transitive clauses this results in potential ambiguity, as nominative and accusative NPs are not distinguished morphologically. Kesisoglou quotes the following example: itó do néka do ándra-t páasen do do xorjó, which could either mean ‘that woman led her husband to the village’ or ‘that woman, her husband led her to the village’ (Κεσίσογλου 1951: 49). To disambiguate such cases, the article is often omitted under the second interpretation according to Kesisoglou: itó do néka ándra-t páasen do do xorjó(Κεσίσογλου 1951: 49). Likewise, itó do peí vavá-t çórsen do ‘that child, its father saw it’ vs. itó do peí do vavá-t çórsen do ‘that child saw its father’ (Κεσίσογλου 1951: 49). This suggests that the article is omitted in the case of subject NPs, but not in the case of object NPs (Janse 2019:100). Upon closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that the article can only be omitted if the noun is historically masculine or feminine, but not neuter. In this paper, I investigate the use of the article in transitive clauses containing two overt NPs in connection with the word order and information structure of these clauses as means of distinguishing subject from object NPs.

References

Dawkins, R. M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Janse, M. 2019. Agglutinative noun inflection in Cappadocian. In A. Ralli (ed.), The morphology of Asia Minor Greek, 66–115. Leiden: Brill.

Κεσίσογλου, Ι. Ι. 1951. Το γλωσσικό ιδίωμα του Οὐλαγάτς. Αθήνα: Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών.