© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI 10.1163/156658409X12500896405961 Journal of Greek Linguistics 9 (2009) 93–109 brill.nl/jgl Watkins’ Law and the development of agglutinative inflections in Asia Minor Greek* Mark Janse Ghent University mark.janse@ugent.be Abstract Tis paper interprets the agglutinative inflection of the copula and passive imperfect in Cappa- docian and Bithynian as an adaptation of the Greek to the Turkish inflection on the basis of the third person singular in accordance with Watkins’ Law. Te first and second person plural forms of these agglutinative inflections add the corresponding Turkish personal suffixes to the Greek ones in the Cappadocian dialect of Semenderé and the Lycaonian dialect of Sílli. It is argued that the Turkish personal suffixes have been added because of the superficial formal similarity of the Greek ones with the corresponding Turkish temporal suffixes. Te addition of the Turkish per- sonal suffixes is interpreted as a case of triggered code-switching and hence as a violation of Poplack’s Free Morpheme Constraint. Keywords agglutination; analogy; code-switching; contact-induced change; free-morpheme constraint; reanalysis; Watkins’ Law 1 Watkins’ Law Watkins’ Law is an hypothesis on the analogical reorganization of inflectional paradigms on the model of the third-person singular first stated by Calvert Watkins in his Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb (1962). Watkins’ origi- nal statement runs as follows: “the development […] or presence […] of a zero ending in the 3sg., and the spread of this 3sg. form to other members of the paradigm” (1962: 96). Compare, for instance, the development of the 1-3sg forms of the verb ‘to be’ from Proto-Iranian to Persian (Fārsi) and from Proto- Slavic to Polish (Watkins 1962: 93f.): * Tis is a thoroughly revised version of the paper originally presented at MGDL T3. I would like to thank Brian Joseph and two anonymous referees for their incisive remarks which have made me rethink the original order of arguments completely. Research for this revision was done while I was an Onassis Foreign Fellow at the National Institute for Research at Athens. Downloaded from Brill.com04/24/2020 01:46:54PM via free access