The Apocope of /s/ in Greco-Corsican1 Nick Nicholas (University of Melbourne) 1 Introduction The Greek spoken in Corsica from 1676 until 1976 (Blanken 1951) is characterised by the deletion of final /s/: (1) Το βρά δυ éνε αéρα της θάλασσα tɔ ˈvraði ˈenɛ aˈera tis ˈθalasa, “at night there is a wind from the sea” Standard Greek: Το βράδυ είναι αέρας της θάλασσας to ˈvraði ˈine aˈeras tis ˈθalasas. (Blanken 1951: 280) This apocope is reminiscent of the behaviour of Greek in Southern Italy (Rohlfs 1977: 47–49), and recapitulates the development within Italian from Latin. This has led several observers to assume that the Corsican phenomenon, like the Italiot, is the result of Romance influence on Greek (e.g. Papadopoulos 1864: 415; Dawkins 1926–1927: 376–378) – especially given the overwhelming tendency in Corsican towards open final syllables (see Fusina 1999: 76, 78 for the very few exceptions to this). However, several Greek dialects also feature apocope of /s/ without any in-fluence from Romance. This is the case in Maniot, the mother dialect of the Cor-sican colony. Given the remarkable conservatism of Corsican Greek, it is more plausible to ascribe the phenomenon to a tendency already extant in Greek. The issue of /s/-apocope in Greek has not been addressed recently, and the extent to which it may have been influenced by Romance has been approached in impres-sionistic terms. In particular, reflecting the linguistic orientation of the times, ac-counts of /s/-apocope have been phonological – whereas the diachronic accounts for /s/-apocope make more sense in terms of syntactic conditioning. In this paper, I sum-marise the existing accounts of /s/-apocope, before investigating the conditioning of /s/-apocope in Maniot and Corsican, and whether there are any differences between the two that may point to Romance influence. To do this, I compare their apocope to that of Italiot, where I argue Romance influence should be assumed. 1 This paper was originally presented at the Second Intenational Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, Mitylene, October 2004. My thanks to the participants for their comments.Nick Nicholas 2 2 Background 2.1 Global Accounts /s/ undergoes apocope in several dialects of Modern Greek (Pernot 1907: 425–429; Triantafyllides 1927–1928: 304–306); these include the dialects of Chios, western Crete, the Cyclades (Naxos, Andros and Ios), Skopelos, Thessaly (Karditsa), Rou-meli (Eurytania, Aetolia, Phocis, Boeotia), and the Peloponnese (Corinthia, Achaea, Tsakonia, Mani) – as well as Southern Italian and Corsican Greek. Of these dialects, /s/ apocope is regular only in Tsakonian; indeed, Tsakonian has no final consonants, other than the use of /r/ as a liaison and a few function words (Haralambopoulos 1980: 132–133 gives moʎis ‘as soon as’, xoris ‘without’, otan ‘when’, as ‘let’, os ‘until’, and an ‘if’). It has been assumed (Anagnostopoulos 1926b: 21) that Tsa-konian /s/ apocope occurred through rhotacism – s > r is attested in late Laconian, and final r presumably lenited to zero.2 But the advanced degree of /s/ loss in Tsakonian means it is of little use in recovering the pathway for /s/ loss elsewhere in Greek. In all other dialects, an underlying final /s/ is preserved, and is deleted only in certain phonological contexts – usually before a word beginning with a consonant. At first sight, this may appear to be a result of degemination: mas na > manːa > mana. This is how Psichari (1889: 13) had accounted for it, and Mirambel (1929a: 173) regarded this as the more plausible account. But gemination is attested only in Chios and Southern Italy out of the dialects in question; and Pernot reports that in Chios such degemination was only incipient. (Pernot 1934: 120, refuting Mirambel, details how Psichari was led astray in Chios through overeager elicitation.) The mainstream account of the phenomenon in Greek linguistics since Hatzi-dakis (1975 [1892]: 275, 352) has instead involved dissimilation. Such an account fits particularly well with West Cretan, where in most locales /s/ is deleted before an enclitic possessive ending in /s/, but not before a possessive ending in a vowel: o aðerfo mas ‘our brother’ but o aðerfos mu ‘my brother’ (Anagnostopoulos 1926a: 152, 160).3 Most dialects of Greek with apocope present a similar picture: the apo- 2 While Pernot (1934: 116–121) admits remnants of such rhotacism in the verb system, he is sceptical that it is necessary in order to account for /s/ deletion in Tsakonian overall, and suspects that the apocope is linked to that occurring elsewhere in the Peloponnese (by which he means Mani). Pernot’s scepticism on ancient dialect survivals is a welcome respite from the occasionally far-fetched speculations on the topic, but the picture that emerges of Maniot apo-cope, as I detail it below, is too restricted to account for Tsakonian. 3 There are other possible phonological accounts for an apocope before a possessive, as confer-ence participants suggested to me. (1) An analogical extension from the degemination before 2nd person possessives: o aðerfos su [oaðerfosu] > o aðerfo su ‘your.sg brother’, o aðerfos sas [oaðerfosas] > o aðerfo sas ‘your.pl brother’. But in that case the restriction against o aðerfo mu in most dialects would be unmotivated. (2) Lenition of /s/ [z] before /m/: /o aðerfos mas/ [oaðerfozmas] > [oaðerfomas]. But while there is precedent for such lenition elsewhere in Greece (Contossopoulos 2001: 37, 38: Apokorona, Crete: [zm], [z#m] > [jm]; [z#n] > [jn], [ɲ]), the apocope is well attested before the third person tu possessive as well, at least in Trian-dafyllides’ data. And once more, the restruction against o aðerfo mu would be unmotivated.The Apocope of /s/ in Greco-Corsican 3 cope occurs before an enclitic or at the end of a proclitic (see discussion of Maniot below), and so does not involve the end of a phonological word. Although I still refer to such deletion as apocope, to distinguish it from the kinds