Το γένος και η κλιτική τάξη στην προσαρμογή δανείων ονομάτων: δεδομένα από τις Νεοελληνικές Μικρασιατικές διαλέκτους

Abstract

This paper offers an account of the main mechanisms governing morphological adaptation of nominal loanwords, in terms of grammatical gender assignment and inflection class membership, in different dialectal systems in the light of the evidence provided by the area of Asia Minor. Our data show that notwithstanding the divergence, grammatical gender splits into its two major primitives, the semantic one relating to sex and animacy and the structural one, i.e. as an inflectional classifier -in correlation with the notion of inflection class- in the organization of nominal classification types. This offers further support to the claim that gender is not a purely morphological or a purely semantic category, but a combination of the two. However, the realization of those two facets, of one, or none of them, is subject to parametric variation depending, especially in contact induced varieties, on the interplay between the grammatical properties of all the involved systems.