Emergence of differential object marking in Asia Minor Greek: A computational approach to language change
Ümit Atlamaz, Metin Bağrıaçık
November 2023 

This paper investigates the emergence of differential object marking (DOM) in the Asia Minor Greek dialect of Pharasa (PhG) under contact with Turkish. We show that DOM in Turkish and PhG are both instances of structural accusative case and can be formally modeled as context sensitive dependent case. We propose that DOM in PhG emerged as a result of contact with Turkish. In particular, we argue that the two main factors were i) case neutralization in indefinite contexts and ii) an increase in the number of V-NP idioms borrowed from Turkish where the NP is in bare form. These perturbations led to a significant change in the overall data created by the community resulting in mixed input for the younger generations. Once the amount of bare NPs pass a certain threshold, a divergent grammar is inevitable. We test our proposal using an abductive generalization learning algorithm based on the Tolerance Principle and running a number of simulations. Our simulation results confirm our hypothesis.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007708 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Variation (accepted)
keywords:	language contact, language change, mixed input, differential object marking, tolerance principle, abductive learning, asia minor greek, turkish, morphology, syntax
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