Variation and Morphosyntactic Change in Greek

Book excerpt: This book deals with some of the major theoretical and descriptive concerns of the historical linguist. The author presents a variationist analysis of weak object pronoun placement in Greek during a transitional period of the language when these elements exhibited both clitic-like and affix-like behaviour. The statistical analysis of the data, providing the first accurate description of the pattern of variation, is used in showing that existing accounts fall short of a full explanation. An alternative approach forces re-evaluation of the role of generalizations in linguistic explanation.