| Περίληψη: | This doctoral thesis examines phenomena of gender assignment, emphasizing language contact and noun borrowing at the interface between Greek and Italo-Romance (Venetian and Italian) on the Ionian Islands. It sets out to document, record and examine an Italo-Romance-influenced dialect of Modern Greek, Heptanesian Greek, which is the dialect of the Ionian Islands. The thesis aims to offer the first systematic investigation of the integration of Italo-Romance features into the Heptanesian noun morphology. Fistly, in endeavoring to profile the Heptanesian dialect synchronically, the present research investigates the strategies, mechanisms and principles regulating loan-noun integration and gender assignment in Heptanesian, with a view to revealing the degree of their integration into the morphological inflectional patterns of the language and the extent to which they transfer characteristics of their origin. Exploring language change that has occurred in the dialect’s noun morphology, this research intends to point to the impact of language contact on the shaping of the language and principal tendencies of the system under consideration. The thesis follows a synchronic-diachronic trajectory in a bid to evaluate contact-induced change in juxtaposition to intralinguistic developments. It is argued that the structural properties and the speakers’ knowledge of the noun-construction scheme of the recipient language underlie the direction and nature of change. In scrutinizing both native and borrowed linguistic material from a language-internal standpoint, the study shows that grammatical gender acts as an instrument for disclosing extant tendencies and endogenous forces of the dialect. It is claimed that the spread of neuter observed in Heptanesian on a synchronic and a diachronic level showcases the tendency of the system to the canonical representation of grammatical gender. The quantitative analysis of the diachronic data underscores the need for an unending analysis that reveals the evolutionary stages intrinsic to change. Finally, the analysis of the data yields the insight that synchronic data as well as data drawn from different historical points can provide explanations leading to assumptions and predictions about the motivations behind borrowing, gender assignment and, more importantly, the system itself and its endosystemic drives.
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