Opening up my Master’s thesis randomly, this para makes all the sense in the world to me, and I’m sure it makes somewhat less sense to most.
Unlike volitionality or temporality, these principles underlying these relations cannot be captured by a referential, truth-conditional semantics. The relationships described by these relations are not real-world relations; they involve the organisation and presentation of text. In Hallidayan terms, they involve not ideational, but textual semantics. For that reason, they can only be expressed in terms of discourse analysis. This makes these relational distinctions decidedly relevant to a rhetorical theory, which purports to analyse discourse structure functionally.
Or maybe some phonetics from a recent-ish paper I coauthored?
The alternative explanation involves the impact of analogical change on verb paradigms in Italiot, but not in Cargese. As seen previously, in Cargese Greek the third person plural of a verb (ekoɣwane ‘they were cutting’ < ekovɣane) is subject to metathesis, but the third person singular, involving a front vowel after vɣ, is not (ekovʒe ‘he was cutting’ < ekovɣe). In Italiot, analogical change has taken place, shifting [j] to [ɣ] before front vowels, and thereby regularizing verb paradigms (Rohlfs 1977: 27: troɣise rather than the expected trojise ‘you eat’, modeled on troɣo ‘I eat’). It is likely then that analogical leveling in Italiot led to the replacement of palatalized [vj] with unpalatalized [vɣ] even in palatalizing contexts. Once this occurred, it fed into secondary metathesis to [ɣv] and subsequent shift in the direction of [ɡw]. If this hypothesis is correct, the main locus of analogy would also have been verb endings, given how widespread ɣ-epenthesis was in Italiot verb inflections, and how infrequent it is in stems: thus, xorevɣo, xorevji > xorevɣo, xorevɣi > xoreɡwo, xoreɡwi ‘I dance, he dances’ (Vuni Italiot, Calabria: Karanastasis 1984–92).
The scary thing is, I don’t think these are far off from how I express myself about linguistics on Quora…