Agglutination, Watkins' law, and the psychology of double inflections in Asia Minor Greek

This paper discusses the agglutinative inflection of the passive imperfect and copula in Cappadocian and Bithynian, 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 endings in the Cappadocian dialect of Semenderé and the Lycaonian dialect of Sílli. It is argued that the Greek personal endings have been reanalyzed as temporal suffixes because of their formal similarity with the corresponding Turkish temporal suffixes. The addition of the Turkish personal suffixes is interpreted as a case of morphologically triggered code-switching and hence as a violation of the Free Morpheme Constraint.This paper discusses the agglutinative inflection of the passive imperfect and copula in Cappadocian and Bithynian, 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 endings in the Cappadocian dialect of Semenderé and the Lycaonian dialect of Sílli. It is argued that the Greek personal endings have been reanalyzed as temporal suffixes because of their formal similarity with the corresponding Turkish temporal suffixes. The addition of the Turkish personal suffixes is interpreted as a case of morphologically triggered code-switching and hence as a violation of the Free Morpheme Constraint.B