The Minimalist Syntax of Control in Greek.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Control phenomena in three distinct domains of the grammar of Modern Greek (subjunctive complements, V-ondas adjuncts and ke-complements) and proposes a unifying syntactic account of Control by appealing to the tense properties of these domains. I argue that Control in Greek is best analyzed as an instance of A-movement of the DP-subject from an embedded clause to a higher one, building upon formal aspects of a movement approach to Control (O’ Neil 1997; Hornstein 1999 et seq.). I demonstrate specifically that the major syntactic domains which show Control in Greek although distinct with respect to morphological agreement, share an underlying grammatical property, i.e. they all lack semantic tense. I show that, due to the tense deficiency of these domains, case valuation is not available within them, therefore the DP subject moves out to a higher clause to have its case valued. Conversely, I argue that the subclasses of Greek subordination domains exhibiting Non-Control properties show evidence of presence of semantic tense. Therefore the nominative case of a DP can be valued, resulting in licensing of lexical subjects or non-control pro. Hence, I provide evidence that (un)availability of Case depends on semantic tense and not on Agreement, i.e. phi- features (cf. Chomsky 1995 et seq.). Additionally, the proposed analysis suggests that Mood or the categorical status of a domain (being a CP or a phase as in Chomsky 2001) is not the determining factor for (dis)-allowing movement but rather the transparency of a domain to movement depends on its featural composition with respect to the [+/-] T feature on the I and C heads, in the case of Greek. Finally, this dissertation relates syntactic theory and experimental psycholinguistics by testing in a Picture Verification experiment with Greek adults the proposed theoretical distinctions regarding tense and Control in Greek subjunctives. The experimental findings show that adults have no restriction in assigning a disjoint interpretation in Non-Control subjunctives when provided with an appropriate discourse context, providing an alternative to Goodluck, Terzi and Chocano Diaz (2001)’s arguments that Greek adults show a general preference for coreference in Non-Control subjunctives.

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