Publications by Year: 2020

2020
Spyropoulos, Vassilios. 2020. Abstract and morphological case in a nominative – accusative system with differential case marking: The case of Asia Minor Greek. In Case, Agreement, and their Interactions: New Perspectives on Differential Argument Marking, 175-218. Berlin: De Gruyter.Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of the relationship holding between abstract and morphological case by examining differential case marking in Asia Mi- nor Greek. Asia Minor Greek dialects have nominative–accusative case systems with overt case exponents; significantly, in these dialects definiteness affects the case marking of the argument either by forcing it to appear in a default case or by marking the relevant definiteness specification by means of a certain (mor- phologically overt) case. I argue that these phenomena do not derive from functional factors, such as the typicality of subject/object, distinctiveness or iconicity, and I present evidence that the relevant abstract Case is always licensed on DP-arguments in these dialects, even in differential case marking situations, and that the surface morphological case is conditioned by morphological factors. Based on this evidence, I claim that differential case marking in such systems is morphological in nature and derives from postsyntactic impoverishment rules at Morphological Structure that affect the feature constitution of the case terminal node resulting in its differentiating exponence and the non-isomorphism between abstract and morphological case.
Revithiadou, Anthi, and Vassilios Spyropoulos. 2020. Cliticization patterns in Greek: A comparative examination with crosslinguistic remarks. In Contrastive Studies in Morphology and Syntax, 225-245. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Abstract
Greek exhibits dialectal and diachronic variation in the cliticization pattern of weak pronouns. In Standard Modern Greek, clitics are strictly preverbal with finite non- imperative verb forms, whereas in the southeastern dialects, as well as in Byzantine and Medieval Greek, clitics seem to obey a second position requirement, since they are preverbal when a function word precedes the verb and postverbal otherwise. A comparison with the adverbal Romance cliticization system and the second position cliticization system of Slavic languages reveals that Greek clitics are neither C- nor v*-related elements and cliticization involves clitic movement to the T-layer. We further argue that the attested variation results from the ways PF (Phonetic Form) processes the syntactic output of this movement. Finally, we show that the two systems are diachronically related to each other by means of a prosodic reanalysis that resulted in the evolution of the non-second position system of Standard Modern Greek from the second position system of Medieval Greek.