Underspecification, parsing mismatches and routinisation: the historical development of the clitic systems of Greek dialects (Q2236488)

The paper examines the historical development of the clitic systems of Standard Modern, Cypriot and Pontic Greek, which is commonly accepted they derive from a common linguistic ancestor, i.e., the Koine Greek, within the framework of the grammar formalism of Dynamic Syntax. The author argues that the transition from the Koine Greek to the Medieval varieties and from the Medieval varieties to the respective modern ones can be explained by assuming that routinisation (in the sense of \textit{M. Pickering} and \textit{S. Garrod} [``Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue'', Behav. Brain Sci. 27, No. 2, 169--226 (2004; \url{doi:10.1017/S0140525X04000056})]) and parsing/hearer asymmetries are two crucial factors behind the syntactic change. He claims that the transition from the Koine to the Medieval Greek varieties involves the emergence of a clitic system with encoded syntactic constraints out of a freer one, where pragmatic preferences rather than syntactic constraints regulated clitic positioning. Further, the transition to the modern varieties from the respective medieval ones is explained, at least partly, on the assumption that production/parsing mismatches are capable of triggering syntactic change. This last assumption, combined with (a) the tendency to obtain more generalised parsing triggers for the individual clitics and (b) the fact that the Medieval varieties in question differ in minimal but crucial ways, provides us with an explanation for the transition to the modern varieties. The paper has the following structure: in Section 2, the author provides a concise exposition of the basic ideas behind the language of representation in Dynamic Syntax, i.e., the language of binary trees underpinned by the Logic of Finite Trees, paying attention to ideas and parts of the formalism that are relevant to the subject under discussion in the current paper. In Section 3, he considers the clitic system of Koine Greek. He supports the view that the Koine Greek clitic system can be better explained as a pragmatically governed system instead of a system with hard-coded syntactic restriction. In the following chapters, 3 and 4, he examines the transition from Koine Greek to the Medieval variations and from them to the modern ones, respectively. He claims that a natural explanation can be provided within the Dynamic Syntax framework, provided that routinisation and parser/hearer mismatches play an essential role in syntactic change.