Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy: Documentation and Theory

Greek and Romance dialects in southern Italy have been in intensive contact with one another for centuries, leading to convergence in their grammars in many key respects that are too striking to be dismissed as accidental.This volume investigates fundamental research questions relating to the exact nature of these Greek and Romance contact grammars, which present a unique opportunity to study, test, and challenge theories of contact-induced morphosyntactic change.They serve as an experimental laboratory in which minimal grammatical differences between two highly homogeneous linguistic systems can reveal what precisely may vary and which linguistic mechanisms underpin that variation.Moreover, Greek and Romance have been spoken alongside each other for centuries in two separate linguistic 'islands' of southern Italy which have themselves never been in contact with one another: this allows a valuable comparison between different outcomes and scenarios of linguistic change and variation in