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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1337962
This article is part of the Research Topic Experimental Approaches to the Acquisition of Information Structure View all 11 articles
Word order and information structure in Romeyka
Provisionally accepted- 1 Other, Unknown, United Kingdom
- 2 University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
In this article, we investigate the organisation of information structure in Romeyka, the only Asia Minor Greek variety still spoken in the area historically known as Asia Minor (presentday Anatolia, Turkey). Through empirical work, we argue that [focus] and [topic] are autonomous structural notions in Romeyka, are both obtained in the left periphery and are associated with an ex situ realisation. Based on our findings, we argue that there is evidence in favour of a reorganisation of information structure in Romeyka due to its isolation from Modern Greek for centuries on the one hand, and due to its contact with Turkish on the other. Its similarities and differences with its cognate variety of Pontic Greek could be an index to investigate the contact induced elements.
Keywords: focus, topic, word order, information structure, OV/VO alternation, Headedness, Romeyka, Pontic Greek, Standard Modern Greek
Received: 13 Nov 2023; Accepted: 26 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Neocleous and Sitaridou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ioanna Sitaridou, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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