Pharasiot Greek. Word order and clause structure.

OpenAlex · İngilizce

Pharasiot Greek is a Modern Greek dialect that was spoken in what is today central Turkey until 1923, when the population exchange between Greece and Turkey was enacted as a supplementary protocol to the Treaty of Lausanne. As of 2018, there are about 25 heritage speakers of the dialect in Northern Greece. This dissertation first offers a sketch grammar of the modern-day dialect based on data collected from the speakers between 2013-2016. Second, it offers an in-depth study of the basic structure of declarative main clauses in Pharasiot Greek, with particular emphasis on the functional sequence in the left periphery of the clause. The theoretical discussions are couched in the framework of generative grammar of Chomskyan tradition, further enriched with the cartographic approach to the clausal left periphery. Besides providing possibly the last sketch grammar of the dialect before its extinction, the dissertation also supports the central tenet of the cartographic approach, i.e., that syntactic representations are complex objects consisting of a sequence of hierarchically organised functional elements and it provides empirical evidence from Pharasiot Greek for a number of ordering restrictions in the left periphery.