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Polydefinites in Greek: Ellipsis, close apposition and expletive determiners1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2011

MARIKA LEKAKOU  and
KRISZTA SZENDRŐI
MARIKA LEKAKOU*
Affiliation:
Goethe University of Frankfurt
KRISZTA SZENDRŐI*
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Authors' addresses: (Lekakou) Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Institüt für Linguistik, Grüneburgplatz 1, D-60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germanylekakou@em.uni-frankfurt.de
(Szendrői) Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, UKk.szendroi@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Greek polydefinites are cases of adjectival modification where the adjective features its own definite determiner. We propose an account of the phenomenon that treats it as an instance of close apposition. Like close appositives, polydefinites in Greek instantiate multiple definite determiners, display a freedom in word order, and involve a restrictive interpretation. We propose that close apposition in Greek forms a complex DP out of two DPs which are in a sisterhood relationship through identification of the Referential roles within the DPs. This operation, semantically tantamount to set intersection, is constrained to apply only when the resulting set is not co-extensive with either initial set. This ensures the restrictive interpretation of one DP over the other. The fact that in polydefinites, it is always the DP containing the adjective that obligatorily satisfies the constraint has to do with the presence of noun ellipsis within that DP: (noun) ellipsis is known to come with a disanaphora requirement. We show that noun ellipsis is also responsible for the distribution of adjectives and adjective interpretations, as well as those discourse effects of polydefinites that have been thought of as the result of a DP-internal Focus projection. Finally, we make a proposal for the encoding of definiteness in Greek, consonant both with the existence of polydefinites in the language and with the prerequisite for set intersection among DPs: the overtly realized Greek definite determiner does not itself contribute an iota operator but preserves the <e,t>denotation at the DP level. Our proposal thus deals not only with the multiple occurrence of definite determiners in a construction that picks out a single discourse referent, but also with the compositionality problem that such a situation gives rise to. In the final part we tie the cross-linguistic (un)availability of expletive determiners of the Greek type to the (un)availability of morphologically realized case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 107 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[1]

We are grateful to the audiences of the MIT Workshop on Greek Syntax and Semantics, the workshop Atoms and Laws of the Noun Phrase, the 40th Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society, and the participants of the Egg school 2010 in Constanta. We are particularly indebted to Artemis Alexiadou, Hector Campos, Marcel den Dikken, Sabine Iatridou, Alexia Ioannidou, Olaf Koeneman, Luisa Marti, Ad Neeleman, Øystein Nilsen, Melita Stavrou, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Hans van de Koot, Reiko Vermeulen, Edwin Williams and Hedde Zeijlstra. The paper has also benefited from the scrutiny of three anonymous JL referees. All errors remain our own. The first author would like to acknowledge that a major part of this work was carried out with the financial support of the European Science Foundation (EURYI grant for the project European Dialect Syntax to Sjef Barbiers).

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