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No abstract

One Pontic Greek variety, Romeyka of Of, Turkey, today preserves a robust infinitive usage. Comparing the current infinitival distribution in Romeyka with previous stages of Greek, I argue that: (a) the Romeyka infinitive has roots in Ancient Greek due to preservation of the constructionprin“before” with infinitive, which remains extremely productive, but which did not survive in other varieties into early medieval times and is only found as a learned construction in ‘high’ registers of the Medieval Greek record; (b) neither the survival of the plain and personal infinitive, nor the emergence of the inflected one can be due to contact with Turkish; (c) the Romeyka infinitive, part of a conservative medieval variety with Hellenistic features, once cut off from other medieval varieties (as early as the 11th c. ce and as late as the 16th c. ce), was reanalyzed as a negative polarity item. Such reanalysis feeds into the discussion that NPIs belong to various syntactic categories, such as nominal NPIs, NPI adverbs, NPI verbs, NPI focus particles, minimizers and now an infinitive, too.

The main objective of this article is to discuss word-order phenomena in Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, and Old Occitan from a comparative perspective. In particular, the following are examined: (i) the empirical evidence in order to assess the theoretical arguments for and against a verbsecond analysis of the Old Romance languages; (ii) verb movement in Old Romance; and (iii) whether the changes in the word-order patterns in the history of the Romance languages can be captured as yet another instance of grammaticalisation. By means of a uniform methodology and statistical analysis of novel data, it is claimed that: (a) Old Romance does not possess a Germanic V2; (b) there is variation in terms of word order among Old Romance languages, which is shown to be linked to the individual history of the languages; (c) V2 order is mostly an epiphenomenon of the discourse mechanisms and the nature of the left functional field in these languages.

This chapter focuses on split wh-constructions and provides an answer to the following two questions: (i) why split wh-constructions were widespread in Classical Greek, but are now impossible in Modern Greek; (ii) why splitting of tinos and pianu, both meaning ‘whose’, are exceptions to the rule against wh-splitting in Modern Greek. Section 14.2 introduces some basic facts about hyperbaton in Classical and Modern Greek and outlines the diachronic puzzle. Section 14.3 presents an account of the licensing mechanism behind DP splitting. Section 14.4 provides a diachronic account of the loss of split wh-constructions in Modern Greek. Section 14.5 discusses the question as to why splitting of tinos and pianu is possible, while Section 14.6 concludes.