Greek: Brief chapter outline
Anastasios Tsangalidis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greek refers to the Standard Modern Greek variety, the sole descendent of Classical Greek,
the official language of Greece. A related variety (Cypriot Greek) is the official language of
the Republic of Cyprus; some smaller dialects are also found in various parts of the world
(mainly, USA, Australia and Germany). There have been attempts to describe dialectal
variation within Greece, the most notable distinctions being the one between mainland and
island varieties and the one between the Northern and the Southern varieties. These mainly
involve minor phonological and lexical differences and generally share the same grammatical
core. Compared to Classical Greek, the modern varieties appear to have lost a number of
inflectional categories and / or distinctions (e.g. the Optative Mood, the inflectional
Subjunctive, the Dative Case and the Dual Number, among others) as well as various
distinctions in the sound system (e.g. the diphthongs, the length contrasts, the tones, not
forgetting a number of rearrangements within the phonological system).
1
Phonetics and phonology
Greek is said to be a version of Classical Greek with all consonants having turned to fricatives
and all vowels reduced to /i/. The former part of this statement refers to the well-known
change of Classical /b, d, g/ to the Modern /v, δ, γ/ and the latter to the loss of the length
distinction and the various vowel qualities which have led to the modern five-member vowel
inventory (i, e, a, o, u), which however clearly correspond to what was, quite obviously (as
witnessed by the orthography) a much richer vowel system (to this day, there are at least 5
different orthographic units that correspond to the [i] sound). The status of modern [b, d, g] is
still hotly debated (as they are argued to have either phonemic status (e.g. in Newton 1972) or
the status of allophones of the corresponding voiceless phonemes).
Stress can only fall on one of the three final syllables. There is no secondary stress. There are
some well studied cases of enclisis and proclisis.
Cumulation of more than two consonants at the beginning of a syllable is disfavoured.
Normally syllables end in either a vowel or one of /s, r, n/.
2
Morphology
Typologically, Greek is quite mixed having inherited a number of complex inflectional
features from its source systems, but also having developed a number of quite analytical
features throughout its history (some of them arguably as the result of contact within the
Balkan Sprachbund). Inflectional morphemes are mostly suffixes which generally involve
‘portmanteau’ realization of the various categories involved (a circumfix is arguably involved
in the formation of the active past, but there are interesting morphophonological
complications as well). There are no infixes, though there are various vowel and consonant
changes (which encode either productive or fossilized processes). There are many wordformation processes and types of compounding (though polysynthesis is at best exceptional).
Most parts of speech inflect (nouns and adjectives, articles, numerals, demonstratives, and
most pronouns inflect for gender, number and case) verbs, auxiliary and modal verbs inflect
for tense, aspect, mood, voice, person and number (and may belong to one of three verbclasses / conjugations); adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles and interjections do not
inflect.
Definiteness is not a morphological category – the definite article may accompany any noun
(including proper names) in either number.
Modern Greek has no morphological infinitive and no morphological future, as part of the
changes related to the Balkan area influence. Greek may also be considered an aspect
language in that all verbs may be formally described as either imperfective or perfective. All
verbs are also marked formally for active or non-active voice (and there are good arguments
that the latter should not be properly called passive).
3
Syntax and semantics
Greek is considered as ‘basically VSO’ (e.g. Philippaki-Warburton 1985) but virtually any
order is possible (depending on information structuring) and indeed there are not many
adjacency requirements (strict adjacency is rather exceptional). Greek is generally a pro-drop
language and pronouns normally occur in marked topic/focus positions.
Within the NP the order is not strictly determined and indeed it is quite possible to have things
like the house the mine, the house mine, the mine the house, the mine house, the big the house
mine, the big house mine etc. The definite article must be used with demonstratives (this the
man, those the Greeks).
Within the verb group there is strict ordering of the following (analytic / clitic) categories,
which apparently correlates with mood / modal categories:
Realis/Indicative:
(NEG1) FUT (IndirectObject) (DirectObject) Lexical verb
Irrealis/Subjunctive:
SUBJ (NEG2) (IndirectObject) (DirectObject) Lexical verb
Imperative (no NEG allowed):
Lexical verb (IndirectObject) (DirectObject)
or
Lexical verb (DirectObject) (IndirectObject)