The aim of this contribution is to give a general overview of the nominal inflection of the Megara dialect. Observations and comments on the similarities and the dissimilarities with other Modern Greek dialectal varieties are offered as well. Our data show that one of the main forces triggering paradigmatic uniformity and restructuring phenomena in the dialect is the drop of paradigms that are marked as [+ learned] and thus less productive, via the incorporation of nouns of learned origin in the most productive and thus unmarked inflectional classes. In this process, the joint forces of the unmarked grammatical gender value with the semantic characteristic [-human] are thought to play an important role in the new class membership. Furthermore, dialectal data offer further support to the claim of the combinatorial role of grammatical gender and inflectional paradigm in the organization of Greek nominal inflection in general.

linguistics