Synthetic-analytic variation in the formation of Greek comparatives and relative superlatives

Abstract

Many adjectives in Modern Greek form both synthetic and analytic comparatives and relative superlatives. To our knowledge, this is the first work to examine the triggers of the Synthetic-Analytic (S-A) variation in this language by means of a corpus study. To date, numerous studies have shown that a series of predictors (phonological, lexical, syntactic) appear to influence the S-A variation in English. The present paper focuses on some factors mentioned in the existing literature (e.g., frequency, number of syllables, syntactic position etc.) alongside Text Type, which is explicitly used as a predictor for the first time. Overall, our results suggest that 1) the S-A variation seems to be influenced by similar predictors cross-linguistically and 2) comparatives and relative superlatives show a partially different picture in Modern Greek, as is also the case in English (Cheung & Zhang 2016).