Variation and morphosyntactic change in Greek: from clitics to affixes

This book deals with some of the major theoretical and descriptive concerns of the historical linguist.

The author presents a variationist analysis of weak object pronoun placement in Greek during a transitional period of the language when these elements exhibited both clitic-like and affix-like behaviour.

The statistical analysis of the data, providing the first accurate description of the pattern of variation, is used in showing that existing accounts fall short of a full explanation.

An alternative approach forces re-evaluation of the role of generalizations in linguistic explanation.