Under the framework of SRNSF’s call for travel grants, Svetlana Berikashvili participated the International Conference on Language Contact in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Her presentations theme was: Loan Verbs Adaptation in Pontic Greek (spoken in Georgia).

The paper presents an empirical study on cross-linguistic influence of contact languages (Turkish and Russian) regarding the process of verb transference (including loanwords and loan blends) in Pontic Greek. The presentation focusses on accommodation strategies of loan verbs, following the classification of Wichman & Wohlgemuth (2008) and the Loan Verb Integration Hierarchy proposed by Wohlgemuth (2009).

The study is based on corpus data, which are collected through several fieldwork periods in the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia (by Evgenia Kotanidi, Svetlana Berikashvili & Stavros Skopeteas 2005, 2014) and is part of the project The impact of current transformational processes on language and ethnic identity: Urum and Pontic Greeks in Georgia at Bielefeld University – funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

The claim is that Pontic Greek possesses different incorporation strategies to accomodate loan verbs from languages with concatenative (i.e. Turkish) and non-concatenative (i.e. Russian) morphology. The majority of the verbs in Pontic use different adaptation strategies i.e. Indirect Insertion (IndI) for the adaptation of Turkish loan verbs by the means of the verbalizer‑ev and Light Verb Strategy (LVS) for the integration of Russian loan verbs. Alongside there are examples of the Direct Insertion (DI), namely infinitive forms from Russian, which should be discussed separately.

The main questions are why different strategies are used to accommodate verbs from different donor languages (immediate donor languages) involved in the transference process and, does typology of the donor language plays any crucial role in the integration process or not.

The novel contribution of this presentation is (a) that it presents data of an understudied variety of the Pontic dialect (as currently spoken in Georgia) and (b) that it compares the morphological integration of verbs originating in concatenative languages with verbs originating in non-concatenative languages in order to disentangle the role of the source language in transference phenomena.