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In Grammatical Gender in Interaction: Cultural and Cognitive Aspects Angeliki Alvanoudi explores the relation between grammatical gender in person reference, culture and cognition in Modern Greek conversation. The author investigates the cultural and cognitive aspects of grammatical gender, by drawing on feminist sociolinguistic and non-linguistic approaches, cognitive linguistics, research on linguistic relativity, studies on person reference in interaction and conversation analysis. The study presented in this book shows that the use of grammatical gender contributes to the routine achievement of sociocultural gender in interaction and that grammatical gender guides speakers' thinking of referents as female or male at the time of speaking.

This book offers new data on the acquisition of functional categories in early child speech. Based on longitudinal corpora of five children acquiring Modern Greek as their first language, it describes the development of single DPs consisting of definite and indefinite articles, complex DPs that require the use of multiple definite articles - possessive constructions, appositive constructions and Determiner Spreading, a form of adjectival modification - and number and case marking in nouns and definite articles. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses show an incremental development of the DP. The findings address the debate concerning maturation versus continuity. Incremental acquisition of the DP argues in favour of a weak continuity approach to language acquisition. Whilst gradual acquisition of the DP remains unexplained within the Principles and Parameters Theory, it is fully compatible within Minimalism, as it is argued to result from the gradual acquisition of the features associated with the Greek DP.

This paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggestts that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro.

We investigate the effects of the historical language contact of Modern Greek (MG) with Vlach Aromanian (VA) in bilingual speakers of three generations living in Epirus, Greece. We focus on a VA variety spoken in a specific language community, with our study constituting one of the early attempts in this field of research. (1) Background: Given that bilingualism is a dynamic process in which language domains are not uniformly affected by external (i.e., sociolinguistic) factors, the investigation of bidirectional crosslinguistic influence can shed light on the resilience of morphosyntactic and semantic feature changes. MG differs from VA in a number of morphosyntactic properties at the DP domain, namely definiteness marking, positioning the adjective and gender marking. (2) Methods: To examine the language contact effects in VA–MG bilinguals, we elicited spontaneous language production in VA and MG from speakers across three generations with different levels of proficiency in each language. (3) Results: The data analysis showed evidence of bidirectional crosslinguistic influence since (a) MG seems to affect VA in definiteness marking and adjective positioning in younger bilingual groups and (b) VA influences MG in gender marking in older bilinguals. (4) Conclusions: The present study presents original language data from VA–MG bilinguals and provides evidence of bidirectional language contact effects.

'Anyone can teach Latin, while teaching Greek is hard'. 'Introductory language courses are easier to teach than intermediate/text-based courses'. These are views that the author of this article has heard voiced in Classics departments on both sides of the Atlantic. They reflect underlying assumptions about language teaching that often have very practical effects on who is assigned what kinds of teaching, and how those instructors approach their task.

Cross-linguistically, oblique theta roles such as location can be encoded by both adpositions and applicative morphemes. In this paper we argue that Standard Modern Greek (SMG), a language that encodes location primarily with prepositions, has a set of morphologically complex predicates that consist of an intransitive verbal root and a locative prefix, and behave like locative applicative constructions. We argue that this prefix is a low applicative head, licensing the addition of a locative DP argument to the intransitive verbal root. Specifically, this applicative head: (i) case-and theta-licenses the added argument, but being void of phi-features, it blocks its cliticization; (ii) is distinct from a homophonous free standing P semantically and syntactically; (iii) is undergoing grammaticalization, as evidenced by the emergence of a novel configuration, in which the locative predicates combine with locative PPs that retrieve semantic and syntactic information of the locative prefix. Our findings show that applicatives may come in various flavors, that a language may use both analytic and synthetic devices to encode location which are not derivationally related, and that lexical/inherent case does not necessarily reduce to a PP structure.

This chapter contains sections titled: Greek and the Indo‐European Language Family The Linguistic Periodization of Greek Phonology Nominal Morphology Pronominal Morphology Verbal Morphology The Lexicon Further Reading

This chapter contains sections titled: Latin and Romance Phonology and Phonetics: Vowels Phonology and Phonetics: Consonants Nominal Morphology Verbal Morphology Syntax Semantic and Lexical Changes Conclusion Further Reading

It is a standard assumption of government-binding theory that the relationship between a constituent displaced by the transformational rule schema Move α and its trace is subject to the locality condition known as subjacency, the central principle of the subtheory of universal grammar known as bounding theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1982, 1986). Subjacency requires that not more than one ‘barrier’ intervene between a moved constituent and its trace, but the definition of the relevant barriers has been, and remains, an issue of considerable controversy. In Chomsky (1977) it is suggested that NP and one of S or S¯ are the ‘bounding nodes’ for English, and many standard textbooks have since argued for NP and S (e.g. Radford, 1981: Ch. 7; van Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986: Ch. 4). Nevertheless, the possibility of cross-linguistic parametric variation may have to be allowed for, since Rizzi (1978) makes out a case for S¯ rather than S as the clausal bounding node for Italian in order to account for the freedom of extraction from so-called ‘wh-islands’ in that language. Chomsky (1980), however, puts forward the possibility that S¯ may be a bounding node universally, and that languages vary according to whether S is also. If it is, then there will be no long-distance movement (cf. standard German and Russian) unless individual verbs are specified in the lexicon as ‘bridges’ which nullify the barrierhood of S¯ (cf. the majority of verbs subcategorized by clausal complements in English). This view is revised and refined in Chomsky (1981: 307), where S¯ is taken to be a bounding node universally when it includes a complementizer or wh-phrase preceding a finite clause, in which case the finite clause S may also optionally be a barrier, and S is taken to be a bounding node when it is governed, as is the case after S¯-deletion in the complements of ‘raising’ predicates. Finally, Chomsky (1986) seeks to unite the definition of barrier for the purposes both of movement and government, assuming two barriers block movement and one barrier blocks government, by proposing that any ungoverned maximal projection is a barrier, and that any maximal projection immediately dominating such a barrier, whether lexically governed or not, is also a barrier by inheritance.

The paper deals with the notion of headedness, as applied to dimutive suffixation. Following evidence from Modern Greek and its dialects, we propose that diminutive suffixes are heads of their constructions on the basis of certain criteria. First, the inflectional paradigms of a number of diminutive formations show irregularities and gaps that are not justified by the inflectional behavior of the base. Second, diminutive suffixes may change a semantic feature of the base, specialize its meaning, and transmit to the formation the morphosyntactic features of gender and inflection class. Moreover, they are subject to subcategorization and selectional criteria, as opposed to inflectional markers, the distribution of which is more or less free. Assuming that headedness characterizes derivational suffixes, but not the inflectional ones, we demonstrate that Modern Greek diminution belongs to the derivational domain.