Arcadian Greek vs. Standard Greek: Dr. Photini Coutsougera Publishes A Dictionary with the Answers

From Dr. Coutsougera: 

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Dr. Photini Coutsougera of Mississauga Campus' Language Studies Department has recently published a new book, A Dictionary of Northeastern Arcadian Greek [in Greek] with Patakis Publications, Athens, Greece (2024)/ 320 pages. 

A Look Inside: Letter Αα, p. 66

The Dictionary of Northeastern Arcadian Greek comprises 4.200 entries and 5.120 senses. These entries were primarily collected during field work, over a period of approximately thirteen years, and from existing written sources. 

Subsequently, they were verified one by one  by a group of native speakers of the dialect, aged 80 and over. Each entry contains semantic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and stylistic information. It also contains a plethora of authentic examples in use, synonyms, antonyms, idioms and idiomatic phrases, proverbs, sayings, and verses from local folk poetry. Finally, a 28-page Prologue includes a compact grammar of the dialect, lays out the research methodology employed in the data collection, and defines Arcadian Greek on the basis of linguistic criteria which systematically differentiate it from Standard Greek. 

This book aspires to bring the Peloponnesian varieties of Greek to the fore as they have been conspicuously absent from the literature.

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New paper: Dresher and Hall (2021)

Elan Dresher (faculty) and Daniel Currie Hall (Ph.D. 2007, now at St. Mary's University) have a paper in the Journal of Linguistics, 57(2): "The road not taken: The Sound Pattern of Russian and the history of contrast in phonology."

This article examines a turning point in the history of the theory of phonological distinctive features. In Morris Halle's (1959) The Sound Pattern of Russian, features are organized into a contrastive hierarchy designed to minimize the number of specified features. Redundancy rules, however, ensure that the resulting underspecification has no real phonological consequences and, in subsequent generative approaches to phonology, contrastive hierarchies were largely abandoned. We explore how Halle's hierarchy would have been different if it had been based on phonological patterns such as voicing assimilation, and show that this reorganization makes plausible predictions about other aspects of Russian phonology. We conclude by pointing to recent work in which the concept of a contrastive hierarchy has been revived, illustrating the range of phenomena that this theoretical device can account for if minimizing specifications is not the primary concern.