From the editors
Articles
Amalia Arvaniti (pp. 9–39)
The phonetics of stress in Greek
Jason Merchant (pp. 41–64)
Islands and LF-movement in Greek sluicing
Anna Roussou (pp. 65–94)
On the left periphery: Modal particles and complementisers
Stavroula Stavrakaki (pp. 95–131)
Verb lexicons in SLI: Some experimental data from Modern Greek
Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli (pp. 133–169)
Gerunds in Greek
State-of-the-Art Review Articles
Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou
(pp. 171–222)
Greek syntax: A principles and parameters perspective
Anastasia Giannakidou (pp. 223–261)
Crosslinguistic semantics and the study of Greek
Book Reviews
Holton, D., Mackridge, P. & Philippaki-Warburton, I.:
Greek: A comprehensive grammar of the modern language
(Dimitra Theophanopoulou-Kontou)
Horrocks, Geoffrey:
Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers
(Julián Méndez Dosuna)
The phonetics of stress in Greek
Amalia Arvaniti
This paper reports on two experiments that investigate the acoustic correlates of primary stress in Greek. The results clearly show that the most robust correlate is amplitude integral, a measurement that combines those of duration and (average) amplitude, and thus is closer to the perceptual property of prominence that characterises stressed syllables. The paper also discusses the role of pitch in signalling stress, by presenting new and re-analysing existing data on this issue. The significance of the present results for our understanding of Greek rhythmic structure is briefly discussed.
Islands and LF-movement in Greek sluicing
Jason Merchant
This paper investigates the interaction of island insensitivities and form-identity effects in sluicing, and examines the consequences of these for the architecture of ellipsis resolution. On the basis of a number of novel facts from Greek, it is argued that current approaches, both PF-deletion and LF-copying, are inadequate. The present data instead motivate a revised LF-copying approach which relies on the scoping movement of indefinites at LF and þ-chain uniformity.
On the left periphery: Modal particles and complementisers
Anna Roussou
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a unified account of the particles þa, na and as in Greek, and second, to refine the articulated CP structure of Rizzi (1997). To this end, it is argued that þa, na, and as occupy the lower C head, which is specified for modality. The particles na and as further raise to a higher C head (partly similar to Rizzi’s Force), thus differing from þa. The distribution of topic and focus in relation to the particles and the typical complementisers oti and an is used as evidence for the postulation of an additional C head characterised as a subordinator/connector, typically occupied by the complementiser pu and optionally by oti and an. The resulting structure differs from Rizzi’s (1997) in that it provides a tripartite C structure and places FocusP/TopicP between the two higher C heads. In the light of this analysis we also consider the position of negation, as well as the position of the verb in imperatives and gerunds.
Verb lexicons in SLI: Some experimental data from Modern
Greek
Stavroula Stavrakaki
The aim of this study is to investigate the verb lexicons of Greek children with SLI on the basis of experimental data from production and comprehension tasks. Two groups of children participated in the experiments: one group of 4 SLI children and one control group of normally developing children matched on chronological age. As the production data analysis indicates, SLI children use a limited verb lexicon comprising a considerable number of light verbs that were often used in a non-adult fashion. Despite the apparent differences between SLI children’s verb production and that of the control group, it is argued that the verb lexicons of SLI children are compatible with the adult verb system in Modern Greek. Based on comprehension data, it is suggested that SLI children’s problems in verb production can be attributed to difficulties in verb retrieval rather than to completely impaired lexical representations.
Gerunds in Greek
Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli
This paper discusses the properties of Greek V -ondas forms, referred to as gerunds in Holton et al. (1997). It is argued that the clauses in which they occur are adjuncts with a reduced functional structure. Their temporal interpretation will be shown to illustrate the underspecified status of the features of the V- ondas complex as well as the truncated structure of the clause in which it occurs. The position and interpretation of subjects of gerunds will be argued to follow from (a) the inflectional underspecification of gerunds and (b) the pragmatic nature of control.