The Greek-Anatolian area in the 2nd millennium B.C.: between language contact, Indo-European inheritance and typologically natural tendencies

Abstract

In this project, we investigated the shared linguistic features in the Greek-Anatolian area in the second millennium B.C., with the aim of disentangling language contact phenomena from socioculturally-dependent traits, inherited aspects and properties that appear to have a strong crosslinguistic validity. Here, we report the results of a study of some true and false morphosyntactic isoglosses: specifically, the function and distribution of Hittite modal particle man and Greek ἄν; the use of verbal prefixes and particles in Greek and Hittite; the typology of absolute genitive constructions in Greek and Hittite.