The morphology - phonology interface

Special types of harmony: I am also interested in contact-induced systems and, especially, varieties of Greek that have been in long-term contact with Turkish such as Asia Minor Greek. In particular, I study systems that show a transition from fusion to agglutination where the effects of morphological change on phonology are more transparent. Another favorite topic of research, investigated in collaborative work with Marc van Oostendorp, is a rather unique pattern of vowel harmony that developed, possibly under the influence of Turkish, in conduct varieties.

Revithiadou, A., M. Van Oostendorp, K. Nikolou & M.–A. Tiliopoulou. 2006. Vowel harmony in contact-induced systems: The case of Cappadocian and Silly. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, Janse, M., B. Joseph & A. Ralli (eds.), 350-365. University of Patras, Patras. [pdf, 368KB]

Prosodic phonology: In collaborative work with Barış Kabak (University of Konstanz), we address the notion of recursivity (REC) in phonology and, especially, at the level of the Prosodic Word. On the basis of evidence from clitic constructions, compounding and complex predicates, we argue that REC is not an inherent property of phonology but the result of its interface with morphosyntax. In particular, it arises primarily from a requirement to mirror recursive morphosyntactic (e.g., complex predicates, adjuncts, etc.) structures.

Furthermore, I contributed the chapter The Phonological Word in the upcoming publication of The Blackwell Companion to Phonology.

Kabak, B. & A. Revithiadou. 2009b. An interface approach to prosodic word recursion. In Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations, Grijzenhout, J. & B. Kabak (eds.), 105-132. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.
[Email me to send you a copy.]

Revithiadou, A. 2011. The phonological word. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, van Oostendorp, M., C.J. Ewen, E. Hume & K. Rice (eds.). Wiley-Blackwell.
[Email me to send you a copy.]

The phonology of PAST in Greek: In recent work with Vassilios Spyropoulos, we claim that, contra to traditional accounts, the antepenultimate stress pattern in past forms such as éγrafe ‘she was writing’ is not an exponent of the PAST, but the surface manifestation of a segmentally empty prefix with lexically-encoded accentual properties, e.g. ' (à la van Oostendorp 2007). We also show that this prefix, which is filled in with the default vowel e, stands in an allomorphic relation with a set of other exponents of the PAST (e.g. -ik). In previous analyses of Greek verb morphology (Warburton 1970; Babiniotis 1972; Ralli 1988, etc.), the exact details of the division of labor between phonology and morphology in the realization of the PAST have not been worked out thoroughly. In this article, however, based on the investigation of certain complexities that have been either ignored or treated in parsimony, we seek to identify the exact function of each manifestation of the past morpheme and the proper conditioning that regulates its distribution.

Spyropoulos, V. & A. Revithiadou. 2008. The morphology of PAST in Greek. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of Greek Linguistics, Stavrou, M., D. Papadopoulou & M. Theodoropoulou (eds.), 108-122. Institute of Modern Greek Studies, Triantafyllidis Foundation, Thessaloniki. [Handout, pdf, 328 KB; paper, pdf, 234KB. Tip: The handout is more detailed.]