On some word-formation and semantic features in Erotapokriseis by Peter the Chartophylax (11th century)

Purpose. Linguistically, Late Byzantine church canonical erotapokriseis are a type of text influenced by the spoken language. However, their material is not actually presented in existing studies of the grammar and vocabulary of the Byzantine Greek. The article is devoted to the consideration of word formation and semantics of Greek lexemes with the suffix -(ι)τζ-.Results. The source for this study was the erotapokriseis of Peter the Chartophylax (late 11th century). Revisions of the text contain various syntactic features. However, of greater interest to us are the lexemes κορίτζα and παπαδίτζης found in the text under consideration, from the point of view of their word-formation model. The article deals with the language features of the text in general, as well as word-formation features and semantic properties of the lexemes in particular. A full-corpus search for κορίτζ- and παπαδίτζ- in the TLG database showed that the first of them occurs 51 times in total (with more than half of the cases in variation with the stem κορίτζι-). Its earliest appearance is recorded in the anonymous Vitae Sanctae Mariae (6th century). Turning to the question of the semantics of the lexeme παπαδίτζης which differs from that presented in historical dictionaries, the author of the article clarifies the contextual meaning of this word. The expansion of the semantic field of this lexeme probably occurred under the influence of the nature of the texts of this genre (church canonical epistolography). The article also analyzes the hypotheses of the origin of the formant -(ί)τζ-.Conclusion. The author comes to the conclusion about possible indigenous Greek or Slavic origin of the formant.