Language Contact and the Development of Negation in Greek — and How Balkan Slavic Helps to Illuminate the Situation

Contact involving different languages has long been a potent force for linguistic change in the Balkans, and Greek, in its several varieties, is a focal point in contact situations in this area. The study of language contact has tended to concentrate on lexical matters, with borrowing being the key issue, but as far as Greek is concerned, structural and grammatical matters have also been important to look at, due to the special relationship that Greek shows with other languages of the Balkans, as members of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund. What is not clear is whether grammatical borrowing is different in nature from lexical borrowing; external influence on grammar, for instance, has been said to be a more difficult effect, one that does not happen all that often and occurs only under special contact conditions, whereas external influence on the lexicon seems to happen more easily, and actually need not involve any contact between real speakers, as the phenomenon of learned borrowing from earlier stages of a languages shows. One domain that involves grammar and structure but at the same time often involves particular lexical items as exponents of grammatical function is negation. Negation therefore is a potentially interesting area in which to explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical borrowing, and Greek, especially in connection with other Balkan languages, provides a particularly fruitful area for such exploration, since external influences have played a role in the development of at least some aspects of negation in Greek and the Balkans. In what follows, a few specific case-studies are examined with the goal of illustrating the effects of language contact on Greek negation. This examination of the partial history of an area of Greek grammar thus necessarily goes beyond Greek itself, looking into the nature of language contact in general and in the Balkans. In this regard, facts from the role of contact in the negation systems of neighboring languages, specifically so-called “Balkan Slavic”, i.e. the South Slavic languages that show structural convergence with other languages of the Balkans as part of the Sprachbund, prove crucial, as they provide some key insights into how language contact can affect negation.