Change and Variation in a Trilingual Setting: Evidentiality in Pomak (Slavic, Greece)

Evangelia Adamou (1)

1 LACITO - Langues et civilisations à tradition orale

In Pomak (Greece), we attest to the loss of a morphologically overt expression of mediate information, passing through a stage of variation (determined by syntactic, semantic, and discursive criteria). This change takes place in a trilingual setting where the main contact language (Greek) has no grammaticalized form to express mediate information, while the second contact language (Turkish), has a verbal past paradigm specialized for evidentiality. This phenomenon is analyzed within a multiple causation approach in which language contact acts as a catalyst.

Mots clés: Pomak; Greece; evidentiality; language contact; degrammaticalization

Domaines: Linguistique

Evangelia Adamou. Change and Variation in a Trilingual Setting: Evidentiality in Pomak (Slavic, Greece). I. Léglise & C. Chamoreau. The interplay of variation and change in contact settings, Benjamins, pp.229-252, 2013, Studies in language variation. ⟨halshs-00460432⟩