Determiner spreading as DP‐predication*

Abstract

Determiner Spreading (DS) occurs in adjectivally modified nominal phrases comprising more than one definite article, a phenomenon that has received considerable attention and has been extensively described in Greek. This paper discusses the syntactic properties of DS in detail and argues that DS structures are both arguments and predication configurations involving two DPs. This account successfully captures the word-order facts and the distinctive interpretation of DS, while also laying the groundwork towards unifying it with other structures linking two DPs in a predicative relation. * We are grateful to the anonymous referees, Melita Stavrou, Io Manolessou, Richard Larson, Catherine Heycock, Kleanthes Grohmann, Brian Joseph, and Giuliana Giusti for comments, discussions and encouragement. Nevertheless, all errors, omissions and misconceptions are to be credited to the co-authors. 1 To the best of our knowledge, the term ÔDeterminer SpreadingÕ was introduced by Androutsopoulou (1994). We prefer this neutral term over the more recent ÔpolydefiniteÕ (Kolliakou 2003(Kolliakou , 2004, because Greek ÔdefiniteÕ determiners (the o, i, to paradigm) are not exclusively definite in interpretation: Giannakidou & Stavrou (1999) have shown the Greek ÔdefiniteÕ article to be an intensionalisation operator. Expectedly, Determiner Spreading is not a definite construction: for instance, it is possible with a generic reading. We will nevertheless continue using ÔDÕ, Ô(definite) determinerÕ and Ô(definite) articleÕ throughout this paper to refer to the o, i, to paradigm. Regarding the Greek Ôindefinite determinerÕ, we will have very little to say about it, as this never occurs in DS structures and it does not uncontroversially belong to the syntactic category of Determiner.2 See Manolessou (2000: Ch. 4) for a detailed description and discussion.

The third person gap in adnominal pronoun constructions

“…Spec,DP), often moved there after first establishing a predication relation with the noun lower in the structure. These approaches are relatively heterogeneous in their specifics, but it is worth noting that those I am aware of are (mainly) based on Japanese (Noguchi 1997;Furuya 2008;Inokuma 2009) or Greek (Panagiotidis & Marinis 2011;Choi 2014a;, although at least Choi (2014a; proposes to also extend his analysis to English. I will return to this class of analyses in Section 2.3 and focus for now on reasons for considering the pronoun to be the head of an English-type APCs and against assuming an appositive analysis.…”

Interpretative Effects of Multiple Determiners in Greek

“…This kind of example is crucial, because it argues against an alternative way of deriving the set of adjectives in polydefinites to the one we have been pursuing here, namely one which invokes a correlation with predicative adjectives. The position held by predicative accounts of polydefinites (Alexiadou and Wilder 1998, Alexiadou 2001, Campos and Stavrou 2004, Panagiotidis 2005, Ioannidou and den Dikken 2006 is that only adjectives that can appear in predicative position are licit in polydefinites. This generalization can derive the facts about relational adjectives, adjectives in proper names and ambiguous adjectives, but Leu's example shows that the proposed correlation breaks down: Proigumenos 'previous' can appear in the polydefinite in the particular context discussed above, but even in this context the adjective is illicit in the post-copular position, as shown in (19).…”

“…One is to show that a common conception of polydefinites as involving predication is not warranted. In particular, the set of admissible adjectives and the restrictive interpretation thereof can be derived without further ado on the basis of an approach to polydefinites that posits noun ellipsis (Panagiotidis 2005, Lekakou and Szendr i 2007, 2009. The second aim is to derive the actual occurrence of multiple determiners.…”

A View of the CP/DP-(non)parallelism from the Cartographic Perspective

“…Determiner spreading in Greek is a much debated topic in Generative Grammar, especially within the framework of the DP-hypothesis (Alexiadou [46], Alexiadou and Wilder [55], Panagiotidis and Marinis [56]). The split-DP analysis sheds new light on this phenomenon.…”

“…Following Cinque [4], Laenzlinger [10,11,24], and Scott [80], the simplified hierarchy can be established in (56) for event-denoting nouns and (57) for object-denoting nouns Laenzlinger [11] (p. 650). 56 Cinque provides a more fine-grained hierarchy with dual positions for direct/indirect adjectival modifiers [37] (see also Sproat and Shih [81,82], Larson [83]) and the possible position for the noun in Germanic and Romance. See (58) and Table 1.…”