Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study describes the usage of subclauses and participial clauses in Xenophon's Hellenica and Anabasis, with additional examples from other texts by Xenophon, providing new insights into the distribution of these clauses by adopting a text grammar-oriented approach.

Abstract The article discusses the meaning of temporal clauses which contain a verb in the indicative with present reference, and specifically the negative forms of these clauses. The aim is to investigate whether and how the use of the negative μή in such clauses changes their meaning when compared to the formally identical clauses negated by οὐ. On the basis of a contextual analysis of several sentences found in classical Greek literature, regularly in non-narrative text, the article argues that, when using the negative word μή in a temporal clause with present indicative, the speaker indicates that he is not fully committed to the claim. However, when the verb in such a clause is negated by οὐ, the speaker treats the claim as an established fact. Thus, the choice of negative reflects different modal statuses of the respective utterances.

This paper studies the structure and origin of prenominal and postnominal restrictive relative clauses in Pharasiot Greek. Though both patterns are finite and introduced by the invariant complementizer tu, they differ in two important respects. First, corpus data reveal that prenominal relatives are older than their postnominal counterparts. Second, in the present-day language only prenominal relatives involve a matching derivation, whereas postnominal ones behave like Head-raising structures. Turning to diachrony, we suggest that prenominal relatives came into being through morphological fusion of a determiner t- with an invariant complementizer u. This process entailed a reduction of functional structure in the left periphery of the relative clause, to the effect that the landing site for a raising Head was suppressed, leaving a matching derivation as the only option. Postnominal relatives are analyzed as borrowed from Standard Modern Greek. Our analysis corroborates the idea that both raising and matching derivations for relatives must be acknowledged, sometimes even within a single language.

The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comprehension in 29 Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Crucially, the DVIQ test included more foils and visual details than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The study had three aims: (1) to examine sentence comprehension performance across various syntactically complex structures (passives, clitic pronouns, subject, and object relative clauses) and identify comprehension asymmetries among these types; (2) to investigate task effects on syntactic comprehension accuracy by comparing performance across the two tests; and (3) to examine differences in error types across tasks. Results showed that autistic children were significantly less accurate in their comprehension performance of passives and clitics in the DVIQ compared to the Syntactic Proficiency Test, with no difference in accuracy observed for subject or object relative clauses, which were consistently high and low, respectively, across both tests. Error patterns also differed across the two tests. More specifically, thematic role reversals in passives were more frequent in the DVIQ than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The overall findings suggest that the DVIQ’s enhanced perceptual complexity may have affected children’s accuracy in their comprehension of passives and clitics, while object relatives were less affected by task effects because of their high structural complexity. The study highlights how visual complexity and foil count can impact syntactic comprehension in autistic children and underscores the importance of task design in assessing syntactic skills in ASD.

This paper considers the Greek language as a member of the Standard Average European (SAE) linguistic area as defined by Haspelmath (1998, 2001). After a brief presentation of the model, there follows a detailed analysis from this perspective of four selected features in Greek: relative clauses with relative pronouns, the “have”-perfect with a passive par- ticiple, participial passives, and negation. The approach applied focuses on specifics that concern standard and non-standard varieties, not only in the language system itself but also in its diachronic development. The results are then measured using Seiler’s (2019) classification of SAE features, with an eye to enriching the classification both empirically and theoretically.* The paper was written with the support of the project “European Changes and Stability: Ancient Civilizations and Languages in Later European Transformations” (MUNI/A/1208/2022), funded by Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive remarks that helped to improve this paper.

Previous cross-linguistic studies have shown that object relative clauses (ORCs) are typically harder to parse than subject relative clauses (SRCs). The cause of difficulty, however, is still under debate, both in the adult and in the developmental literature. The present study investigates the on-line processing of SRCs and ORCs in Greek-speaking 11- to 12-year-old children and adults, and provides evidence on relative clause processing in Greek—a free word order language. We conducted a self-paced listening task in which we manipulated the type of relative clause (SRC vs. ORC), the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled), and the type of relativizer (relative pronoun vs. complementizer). The results showed that SRCs were overall processed faster than ORCs, providing evidence that children follow similar processing strategies to adults. In addition, accusative case marking facilitated the processing of non-canonical structures in adults but less so in children. Children showed heavy reliance on word order, as they processed nominative and accusative pre-verbal NPs in exactly the same way, while they were strongly garden-pathed in ORCs with post-verbal nominative NPs. We argue that these results are compatible with the Competition Model.

In ancient Greek, relative pronouns are, as a rule, subject to wh-movement and obligatorily surface at the left edge of the relative clause. However, the archaic poet Pindar sometimes allows material belonging to the relative clause to appear in front of the relative pronoun, which is then postponed within its clause. In this paper, I survey all relative clauses in the surviving texts by Pindar and study the possible differences in semantics and syntax between relative clauses with initial and postponed relative pronouns, which turn out to be indistinguishable in both respects. I suggest that postponed relative pronouns do move syntactically to the Spec of their relative clause but are then optionally treated as postpositive words and surface in second position in the relative clause. Phonological arguments, based on the distributional properties of postpositive words and on the metrical makeup of Pindar’s texts, are put forward to show how postponed relative pronouns select a host at the left edge of the relative clause and incorporate phonologically to it. The informational status of relative pronouns as ratified (given) topics triggers their phonological demoting, which turns them into postpositive words, a regular process in ancient Greek. Approaching the position of relative pronouns as a conflict between syntactic and (informationally driven) phonological alignment explains why Pindar’s strategy for relativization remained rare in ancient Greek and eventually disappeared: It took one specific poetic genre to allow phonology to outrank syntax.

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

This study investigates variability in second language learning. It contributes new data to the ongoing discussion on whether L2 learners can acquire grammatical phenomena that are absent from their L1. We focus on knowledge of English Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) in Greek advanced learners of English and explore reasons for variability in their performance. Greek does not have VPE of the English type and the subtleties surrounding its regulation make it unlikely that most learners can obtain these rules from the linguistic data available to them. If this is so, then the proficiency they illustrate must tap into underlying knowledge they already possess. We examine this knowledge by testing their judgements of (a) VPE sentence sets where there is strict parallelism between the antecedent and elided clause, (b) VPE sentence sets where this parallelism is disrupted, and (c) VPE sentence sets whose acceptability is mediated by the interpretability of the aspectual feature in the elided clause. 27 Greek learners of English and 30 L1 speakers of English undertook a sentence-completion judgement task similar to that of Hawkins (2012). Greek participants accepted VPE sentences in principle and rejected those ruled out by recoverability (Rouveret 2012). However, their judgements of examples mediated by interpretability did not demonstrate conclusively whether they could distinguish between interpretable (perfective) and uninterpretable (progressive) features in English. Our data provide fresh cross-linguistic support for L2 learners being able to acquire constructions absent from their L1 and to adhere to the restrictions that regulate them. However, they remain inconclusive as to whether it is a sensitivity to feature interpretability that answers for the variability evident in their responses to (c), a finding that merits further testing.     

In this study we explore similarity effects in the processing and comprehension of subject (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) in Greek as a first (L1) and second (L2) language. Increased disruption in the processing of ORCs in the L1 due to featural similarity in the nominal domain (e.g., number match) is accounted for by approaches such as the featural Relativized Minimality, and similarity-based interference models. Similarity effects are much less researched in the L2 and the findings are thus far inconclusive. We report online and offline data obtained by means of a self-paced reading task with native and non-native speakers of Greek. Our findings reveal processing and comprehension costs for ORCs as well as similarity effects modulated by the RC type during L1 and L2 online sentence processing. The non-native speakers show some indication of increased interference due to ORCs at the end of the sentences, and also lower accuracy than the native speakers. However, their accuracy is positively affected by proficiency scores. Our findings show that number match affects the processing of RCs alike in both groups, implying that native and non-native speakers of Greek overall employ similar parsing routines.