Easily in the Middle*

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the nature of adverbial modification in Germanic middles. I present new arguments against semantic/pragmatic accounts and in favour of a ‘structural’ approach: the adverb is required in languages that lack a syntactically represented Agent in order for the latter to be recoverable via identification with the adverb’s Experiencer/Benefactor. This enables us to make sense of the fact that French and Greek middles do not require adverbial modification: these are languages, whose middles have a syntactically active Agent, and hence do not require adverbial modification as a means of recovering it

Impersonal middles in German

We develop an analysis of impersonal middles in German which capitalizes on the observed similarities between personal and impersonal middles, and on Lekakou’s (2005) treatment of the former as disposition ascriptions. We argue that the disposition in impersonal middles is ascribed to an event(uality), rather than an event participant. The non-omissible ‘it’ subject pronoun functions as the syntactic and semantic subject. We further propose that the pronoun refers to the event denoted by the verbal predicate by virtue of taking as its associate the vP. The additional modifier is required for pragmatic reasons, namely in order to restrict the generalization made

Unagreement is an illusion

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9311-yThis paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggests that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro

This is personal: Impersonal middles as disposition ascriptions

We develop an analysis of impersonal middles which capitalizes on the observed similarities between personal and impersonal middles, and on Lekakou’s (2004; 2005a) treatment of the former as disposition ascriptions. The following questions are addressed: (i) What is the disposition ascribed to in impersonal middles? (ii) What is the function of the obligatory subject pronoun? (iii) Why is a modifier needed, in addition to the manner/evaluative adverbial? By having a closer look at what types of additional modifiers are acceptable in impersonal middles, it is argued that the disposition in impersonal middles is ascribed to an event(uality), rather than an event participant. This is done via the non-omissible 'it'-type pronoun that functions as the syntactic subject of the clause. We argue that this pronoun in impersonal middles is also the semantic subject, and that it indirectly refers to the event denoted by the verbal predicate, via an association relation with the vP. Impersonal middles, then, are not truly impersonal: they, too, feature a referential subject. The only difference between personal and impersonal middles relates to what the dispositional subject is: an event participant, or the event proper. We also show that the additional modifier is required for pragmatic reasons, namely in order to restrict the generalization made by the generic operator present in impersonal middles

Subjunctive mood in Griko: a micro-comparative approach

We present an analysis of subjunctive complements in Griko, a Modern Greek dialect spoken in Southern Italy. Despite the obvious similarities with the properties of subjunctive clauses in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), introduced by na in both varieties, we capitalize on the contrasting distribution of verbal forms in each case: while in SMG all temporal-aspectual combinations are allowed in na-clauses and no specific subjunctive morphology is used, Griko only features perfective non-past in the same context. This fact is argued to instantiate the specialization of aspectual morphology in Griko for the marking of subjunctive on the verb. We propose that the morphological marking of subjunctive that had been lost in earlier stages of the diachronic development of Greek re-entered Griko as a result of contact with Salentino, the southern Romance variety spoken in the same area, which also exhibits mood concord between a subjunctive complementizer and dedicated subjunctive morphology on the verb. Although the realization of subjunctive in Griko and in SMG appears to be an instance of microvariation in the syntax (mood concord in the former, no mood concord in the latter), we argue that it ultimately reduces to the feature specification of particular elements, namely inflectional morphemes.The project has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Josep Quer's contribution to this research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, FFI2012-36238), and by the Government of Catalonia (2014 SGR 698)

Subjunctive mood in Griko: a micro-comparative approach

We present an analysis of subjunctive complements in Griko, a Modern Greek dialect spoken in Southern Italy. Despite the obvious similarities with the properties of subjunctive clauses in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), introduced by na in both varieties, we capitalize on the contrasting distribution of verbal forms in each case: while in SMG all temporal-aspectual combinations are allowed in na-clauses and no specific subjunctive morphology is used, Griko only features perfective non-past in the same context. This fact is argued to instantiate the specialization of aspectual morphology in Griko for the marking of subjunctive on the verb. We propose that the morphological marking of subjunctive that had been lost in earlier stages of the diachronic development of Greek re-entered Griko as a result of contact with Salentino, the southern Romance variety spoken in the same area, which also exhibits mood concord between a subjunctive complementizer and dedicated subjunctive morphology on the verb. Although the realization of subjunctive in Griko and in SMG appears to be an instance of microvariation in the syntax (mood concord in the former, no mood concord in the latter), we argue that it ultimately reduces to the feature specification of particular elements, namely inflectional morphemes.The project has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Josep Quer's contribution to this research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, FFI2012-36238), and by the Government of Catalonia (2014 SGR 698)

Aspect in the service of mood: the morphosyntax of subjunctive in Griko

The topic of this paper is the realization of subjunctive mood in Griko. On the basis of the distribution of verbal forms inside na-clauses, we put forward the claim that, unlike Standard Modern Greek, in Griko subjunctive mood is encoded through both the choice of complementizer and the morphology of the verb. The complementizer na and the verb inside the embedded clause are thus in a relation of concord. We further propose that concord in terms of mood is a grammatical feature induced in Griko via contact with Salentino. If our analysis is on the right track, then subjunctive mood is another domain where contact between Italo-Greek and Italo-Romance in Southern Italy has had effects in both directions.This work reports results from the project ‘Documentation and analysis of an endangered language: aspects of the grammar of Griko’. For details see: http://griko.project.uoi.gr/. The project has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged

Aspect in the service of mood: the morphosyntax of subjunctive in Griko

The topic of this paper is the realization of subjunctive mood in Griko. On the basis of the distribution of verbal forms inside na-clauses, we put forward the claim that, unlike Standard Modern Greek, in Griko subjunctive mood is encoded through both the choice of complementizer and the morphology of the verb. The complementizer na and the verb inside the embedded clause are thus in a relation of concord. We further propose that concord in terms of mood is a grammatical feature induced in Griko via contact with Salentino. If our analysis is on the right track, then subjunctive mood is another domain where contact between Italo-Greek and Italo-Romance in Southern Italy has had effects in both directions.This work reports results from the project ‘Documentation and analysis of an endangered language: aspects of the grammar of Griko’. For details see: http://griko.project.uoi.gr/. The project has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged

A small Griko-Italian speech translation corpus

International audienceThis paper presents an extension to a very low-resource parallel corpus collected in an endangered language, Griko, making it useful for computational research. The corpus consists of 330 utterances (about 20 minutes of speech) which have been transcribed and translated in Italian, with annotations for word-level speech-to-transcription and speech-to-translation alignments. The corpus also includes morphosyntactic tags and word-level glosses. Applying an automatic unit discovery method, pseudo-phones were also generated. We detail how the corpus was collected, cleaned and processed, and we illustrate its use on zero-resource tasks by presenting some baseline results for the task of speech-to-translation alignment and unsu-pervised word discovery. The dataset is available online, aiming to encourage replicability and diversity in computational language documentation experiments