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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 61–92

Restrictive relative clauses in the Greek dialects of Pharasa and Cappadocia

| Ghent University

Relative clauses in Cappadocian (Greek) are introduced by two morphemes that agree with the Head in number. In Pharasiot (Greek), on the other hand, there is one morpheme marking RCs. I argue that the morphemes in Cappadocian are not relativizers but are agreement markers appearing not only on relatives but also on numerals/adjectives in a definite DP. In Pharasiot, the invariant morpheme is a complementizer emerged by the fusion of the external determiner and a complementizer in a D-CP structure. I further show that pre-nominal relatives in Pharasiot display characteristics of matching relatives whereas post-nominal ones should be analyzed as raising structures. Preliminary evidence suggests that in Cappadocian both pre- and post-nominal relatives involve a matching derivation.

Keywords: relative clauses, pre-nominal, post-nominal, Cappadocian Greek, Pharasiot Greek
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Greek dialects of Cappadocia and Pharasa, and their speakers
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Extended Projection of NPs in CG and PhG
  • 5.The position of (pre-nominal) RCs in the extended projection of NP
  • 6.On the so-called relativizers and the structure of RCs
    • 6.1CG: No relativizers
    • 6.2PhG: The origin of the relativizer and the structure of RCs
    • 6.3CG again: The structure of RCs
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.03bag
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