From syntagmatic to paradigmatic spatial zeroes: The loss of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek

Abstract

Abstract We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero-marking was contextually-dependent on the presence/absence of a prenominal genitive modifying the head noun of Ground-encoding NPs and on the presence/absence of Region-encoding postpositions. We attribute these developments to an informational load relief strategy aimed at producing more economical utterances, as well as to language contact with Turkish, which favored structural convergence on the adpositional level between the two languages.