Typological Perspectives on Modern Greek

Greek is one of the more intensely-studied languages in the world, with regard to its history, structure, and social setting, but despite this special place that Greek holds in the pantheon of human languages, the modern form of the language has played a relatively minor role in linguistic studies aimed at developing a general typology of natural language, i.e. the development of a taxonomy of characteristics and their various combinations that help to delimit the range of what it means to talk about a “possible human language”. Moreover, the relative neglect of Modern Greek in this regard comes in spite of the fact that there is much that the language can offer to typological studies.