Syntactic variation across Greek dialects

Abstract The syntax of demonstratives in the Greek varieties of southern Italy and more broadly in diaspora Greek can serve as a case study of how long-term unbalanced contact can give rise to syntactic borrowing, shedding light on both necessary and sufficient formal conditions of contact-induced reanalysis and change. Diachronically, Greek features adjective-like demonstratives. In southern Italy and Asia Minor, the adjectival syntax of demonstratives is being and has been lost under pressure from Italo-Romance dialects and Turkish respectively. This radical departure from the traditional Greek pattern is, arguably, impossible in the absence of contact. Crucially, however, a new grammatical rule can only be borrowed if its most characteristic outputs are already possible in the target language, or are made possible through language-internal dynamics.