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In Cappadocian and Pharasiot, the two main members of the inner Asia Minor Greek dialect group, the head nouns of NPs found in certain syntactic positions are marked with the accusative if the relevant NPs are definite and with the nominative if the NPs are indefinite. This differential case marking (dcm) pattern contrasts with all other Modern Greek dialects, in which the accusative is uniformly used in the relevant syntactic positions. After revisiting recent proposals regarding the synchronic status of dcm in Cappadocian and Pharasiot, I show how the two dialects developed this ‘un-Greek’ feature in the model of Turkish, which marks the head nouns of direct object NPs with an accusative suffix only if they take a specific reading leaving non-specific direct object NPs unmarked. I subsequently trace the diachronic trajectory of this contact-induced innovation within the two dialectal systems, seeking to explain why dcm was gradually lost in Cappadocian but preserved in Pharasiot.
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.