Tracing the historical development and loss of grammatical gender in inner Asia Minor Greek
In this talk, I explore the diachronic evolution of grammatical gender in inner Asia Minor Greek, with a focus on two distinct but related varieties, Cappadocian Greek and Pontic Greek, that have undergone significant restructuring of their gender systems. Traditionally, Greek has maintained a stable tripartite gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter), but in Cappadocian Greek, this distinction was lost, with all nouns exhibiting neuter agreement patterns. While previous studies have largely attributed this development to language contact with Turkish, I re-evaluate the interplay of internal and external factors, arguing that the changes were set in motion by language internal processes, which were later accelerated by contact with Turkish.
I propose that the roots of these processes can be found in Pontic Greek, which developed an innovative semantic agreement system, where masculine and feminine inanimate and non-human animate nouns increasingly trigger neuter agreement. This shift aligns with broader typological patterns, where semantic agreement emerges first in more syntactically distant agreement targets before spreading to closer ones, following Corbett’s (1991, 2006) Agreement Hierarchy. By examining historical and contemporary data, I reconstruct the trajectory of these changes, proposing that innovations similar to the ones that are still visible in Pontic laid the groundwork for the more radical loss of gender in Cappadocian.
