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

Abstract

The paper investigates investigates how Italian and Greek employ Clitic Left Dislocation (clld) to encode discourse topics. Greek is sensitive to the definiteness/referentiality of the topic, employing clld exclusively for referential topics and resorting to Topicalisation for non-referential/property denoting topics. By contrast, clld is the main topic-strategy in Italian including non-referential/property denoting topics. This contrast is shown to mirror variation in more general patterns of anaphoric relations in the two languages, which, in turn, relate to the structure of nominal arguments: the fact that Greek non-referential indefinites systematically involve bare nouns which may be dropped rather than picked up by a pronoun in intrasentential anaphora contexts; the fact that Italian indefinites always involve a determiner and Italian pronouns can support property anaphora.The hypothesis is that the crosslignuistic variation in the anaphoric and clld patterns is the consequence of structural variation in the syntax of nominal arguments. Greek * We would like to thank the audiences of the following workshops and conferences:

Quantifier scope and information structure in Greek

“…However, Alexopoulou & Folli (2019) abandon this account since, as they argue, it cannot explain why CLLD-ed indefinites in Italian can be in the scope of a universal. In Alexopoulou & Folli (2019), they develop an account according to which the clitic in Greek is obligatorily referential, therefore forcing a referential interpretation for the CLLD-ed indefinite. From the same reasoning, it follows that true quantifying expressions cannot be CLLD-ed.…”

Adjective-Noun combinations in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy

“…However, such differences are not directly related to our main concern and so we leave the issue to future further exploration. 46 Alexopoulou & Folli (2019) have suggested that a difference between Western Romance and Greek is that, while the former allows a null D, the latter does not.…”

A Plural Indefinite Article in Heritage Greek: The Role of Register

“…This paper is concerned with the properties and the distribution of the indefinite determiner kati "some" in Greek. While kati is mentioned in some work on Greek indefinite NPs, see e.g., Haspelmath (2001); Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (2009); Giannakidou (2012); Alexopoulou and Folli (2019); and Etxeberria and Giannakidou (2021), among others, systematic studies of this determiner are scarce, with Tsoulas (2021) being a notable exception. The behavior of kati is intriguing, as it combines uniquely with plural nouns, although diachronically, as Holton et al (2019) report, other combinations were also possible.…”