The Historical and Cultural Dimensions in Grammar Formation: The Case of Modern Greek

In formulating grammatical descriptions, there is a natural and understandable tendency to focus solely on synchronic structural elements, based on the quite reasonable assumptions that structure is crucial to grammar and that coherent descriptions are possible only for one stage of a language at a time. Thus diachrony becomes irrelevant and extraneous to the goal of typology, under that view. Similarly, for those interested in structure, the existence of socially determined variation in usage can pose particular problems, to the point where ignoring variation may be a methodological necessity, at least for certain types of theorizing. It is argued here, however, that one cannot ignore socio-cultural and historical aspects involved in the process of grammar formation, as engaged in both by speakers and by analysts interested in compiling a grammar. An investigation is undertaken here of the case of Modern Greek, as a speech community with a long tradition of grammatical description, strong prescriptive attitudes, and a pervasive awareness among speakers as to the historicity of their language, factors which together have impinged on and influenced both the modern linguist-grammarian and the native users of the language. In particular, just as the speaker is confronted with choices between innovative and conservative forms — the latter accessible, for instance, through archaizing registers and texts — the analyst is confronted with the need to take into account the lengthy descriptive heritage and the classicizing prescriptive notions, and faces the dilemma of deciding whether to strip them away or to incorporate them into the grammatical account. In a sense, then, history and attitudes can push typological limits, a key issue in developing accounts of human language in general, and of human languages in particular. It is well-known that typologists, like the languages they investigate, come in different types. All are interested in the nature of human language, yet some get at that elusive goal by focusing on familiar languages, in an attempt to draw on the typically wider range of resources — not to mention