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PhD project by Ulrich Geupel

Affix Ordering in Ancient Greek

Old Indo-European languages are known to exhibit complex derivational chains that produce multi-suffixed nouns. However, there are strong restrictions on the formation: Many theoretically possible suffix combinations are apparently not permitted.

The question of the nature of these restrictions has triggered a series of studies in General Linguistics under the term affix ordering. Recent research suggests that different affixes in a language can be ordered along a hierarchy of morphological complexity according to the strength of the resulting morpheme boundary. The relative strength of this morpheme boundary is calculated from the parsability of the affix, which can be determined by phonological or quantitative factors (type-token relation).

The aim of my dissertation project is to test these models for the first time on an Old Indo-European corpus language, Ancient Greek. This will be done using a number of suffix combinations and with the help of statistical methods and recent studies on morphological productivity. One result could be to explain the different behavior of synchronically competing suffixes, e.g. -οσúνη versus -ότης for the formation of deadjectival abstracts. Finally, a comparison between different linguistic periods of Greek will demonstrate diachronic changes in the combination options and formation preferences for individual suffixes.