Title

Morphosyntactic Variation in the Past Tense of Greek as Spoken by Greek Canadians

Abstract

I examine the usage pattern of two key dialectal features in the speech of Greek immigrants to Canada during the period 1945 to 1975 in order to determine whether these patterns provide evidence of dialect contact among the population of these new communities. I investigate the variation between the presence of the unstressed past tense augment (/e/) (non-standard) and its absence. I also investigate the variation between two imperfective past stem markers of the active voice occurring in the second inflectional category verbs.

Keywords

Modern Greek; dialectology; morphosyntax; sociolinguistics; Greek Canadians

About the student

Laurens Bosman began his undergraduate studies with the School of Computing Science, but after taking Introduction to Linguistics (LING 220), he decided to switch gears and incorporate more Linguistics courses. Bosman completed a BSc in Computing Science and Linguistics at SFU in 2022 and started his MA in Linguistics the same year. His research focus has been analyzing variation in Greek past tense morphology. Bosman has drawn on expertise in both linguistics and computing science to extract and analyze data from large corpora to better understand patterns in language. 

Committee

• Dr. Panos Pappas (Supervisor)
• Dr. Maite Taboada (Member)
• Dr. Simeon Tsolakidis (External examiner)