Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French. </jats:p

Definiteness and the Make-up of Nominal Categories

Much research on the syntax of nominals assumes a mould designed on the basis of properties of the English noun phrase. This, for the most part, consists of a determiner and a noun projection. The Greek noun phrase, however, does not fit into such a mould but rather requires a quite different perspective. First, the various nominal categories (nouns, adjectives, numerals, determiners, etc. and their projections) are much less distinct than generally assumed. Secondly, definiteness and indefiniteness are expressed in ways that cannot be accommodated within an English-style determiner-centric system. The principal objective of this paper is to provide a syntax of nominal categories that complements English-style descriptions and account for definite concord phenomena, &quot;determinerless&quot; NPs, and elliptical nominals that lack a noun head. The account proposed is couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). HPSG&apos;s multidimensional architecture lends itself well to exp..

An HPSG Approach to Definite Concord and Elliptical Nominals

this paper is to provide a syntax of nominal categories that will complement English-style descriptions and account for definite concord phenomena, &quot;determinerless&quot; NPs, and elliptical nominals that lack a head noun. The account proposed is couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (se

Possessive Affixes and Complement Composition

A long-standing issue in the literature on clitics, namely, whether they can be best analysed as affixes or syntactically autonomous words (postlexical clitics), is here addressed with respect to the Modern Greek `weak form&apos; possessive pronoun. It is argued that distributional and phonological evidence strongly support an affixal analysis. Apparent difficulties for extending to possessive affixes an HPSG account that has been previously employed for pronominal affixation in Romance VP are overcome, and a composition approach is proposed -- one which takes a categorial grammar approach to adjectives and treats them as heads in NP, and does not require flat NP structures that lack independent motivation in Modern Greek. 1 Introduction A long-standing problem in the literature on clitics has been the issue of whether they can be best analysed as affixes or as syntactically autonomous words. According to one proposal, cf. e.g. Anderson (1992), all `clitics&apos; are phrasal affixes and should..