On the interpretation of null indefinite objects in Greek

Anastasia Giannakidou · Jason Merchant

53 citations0/0 files storedUvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam)

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Classical Studies and Philology Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the properties of a novel kind of nominal ellipsis in Greek, which we call indefinite argument drop (IAD), concentrating on its manifestation in object positions. We argue that syntactically these null objects are present as pro, and we show that semantically they are licensed only by weak DP antecedents (in the sense of Milsark 1974). We compare IAD with NPinternal ellipsis, as attested also in English among many other languages, and show that IAD has distinct syntactic and semantic properties. Finally, we compare our account with a number of proposals regarding null objects in the literature, and show that IAD cannot be reduced to any of these.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

References

1982The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases 1977Reference to kinds in English 1993From Discourse to Logic 1984On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns 2003Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro 1975Adverbs of quantification 1963Reference and Generality.1989The Null Subject Parameter

Cited by

2017Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese 2010Context-Dependence, Perspective and Relativity 2012The Landscape of Greek Quantifiers 2013Null and cognate objects and changes in (in)transitivity 2011Partial pro-drop as null NP anaphora 2009NP-anaphora in Modern Greek: A partial neo-Gricean pragmatic approach 2018Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.