Contact at the treetops: syntactic borrowing and syntactic complexity

We examine the function and structure of ki-clauses in Modern Greek dialects of Trabzon (Romeyka), Silli, Cappadocia and Pharasa. We demonstrate that ki, transferred from Turkish, has been integrated into the clausal spine of these dialects in JudgeP (Krifka, 2023), whereby the speaker renders their private epistemic judgement regarding an assertion in its scope. In the source language, Turkish, ki spells-out not only Judge head—the lowest head in the expressive layer—but all heads of this layer. Given that ki realizes solely the Judge head in the Asia Minor Greek dialects, we propose a constraint according to which the accommodation of morphosyntactic rules in contact situations commences at the lowest relevant projection of a layer relevant to that rule. In other words, the accommodation of contact-induced rules correlates with structural complexity.