This article addresses the issue of why some languages permit the interpretation of what are basically simple‐action transitive verbs (e.g. beat) as causative change‐of‐state verbs in the context of a ‘resultative’ adjective (e.g. beat the metal flat), while others do not. This crosslinguistic asymmetry has not received an entirely satisfactory explanation, despite the fact that resultative predication has been widely discussed from a variety of perspectives. We note that languages show a systematic correlation between (1) the presence of a grammaticalized opposition between perfective and imperfective aspect lexically/morphologically encoded in verb forms and (2) the absence of secondary syntactic predication encoding result states in combination with verbs otherwise denoting simple actions. Greek and English are taken as representative of the two ‘types’ of language. Building on the insights of Talmy (1985), Tenny (1987, 1994) and Snyder (1995), among others, an explanation is proposed for the absence of such secondary predication in Greek and similar languages based on the restrictive effects of grammatical aspect marking on the contextual (re)interpretation of a verb's inherent aspectual character (Aktionsart)—effects which render impossible the conversion by syntactic means of VPs denoting atelic activities into VPs denoting accomplishments. We also show that the ‘failure’ of some languages to allow the unaccusativization of agentive verbs of motion (e.g. unergative walked in the park v. unaccusative walked into the park) is closely related to this issue, though the outcome is also subject to a given language having the resources to mark ‘goals’ unambiguously. An important conclusion of the analysis is that the ‘deficit’ of languages like Greek in not encoding such resultative predication syntactically is not syntactic in character, but located at the interface of inflectional morphology and lexical semantics.

This paper investigates aspects of adjectival modification in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy. In Italiot Greek, prenominal adjectives obey restrictions that do not exist in Standard Modern Greek, where all types of adjectives are allowed in prenominal position. As far as postnominal adjectives are concerned, in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek there is evidence of postnominal adjectives systematically articulated in definite nominal structures (henceforth DP s), in a structure similar to the so-called polydefinite construction that is typical of Standard Modern Greek (and of Greek in general since ancient times). Some residual evidence of such a construction is also found in Salento. Yet, in the varieties currently spoken in the two areas, postnominal adjectives are never articulated. The paper explores these patterns, with particular attention to the mechanisms potentially responsible for the loss of polydefiniteness.

In this paper, we investigate patterns of persistence and change affecting the syntax of nominal structures in Italiot Greek in comparison to Modern (and Ancient) Greek, and we explore the role of Southern Italo-Romance as a potential source of interference. Our aim is to highlight the dynamics that favor syntactic contact in this domain: we provide an overview of the social context where these dynamics have taken place and of the linguistic structures involved.

In this paper we revisit the main properties of the partitive (PC) and the pseudopartitive construction (PPC) in Greek placing our focus on the distribution of the prepositionapo‘of/from’, which introduces the partitive complement in the PC but is absent from the PPC. We propose two distinct analyses for the two constructions, which predict the particular distribution ofapoas a meaningful preposition, according to our hypothesis. We further discuss the crosslinguistic implications of our analysis.

The Greek language has a documented history of nearly 3500 years

The present entry focuses on definiteness agreement patterns in Modern Greek by exploring the function of the definite article in structures that involve a head noun and a modifier—typically an adjective, but not only—that is also accompanied by the definite article. Such structures have been variously dubbed polydefinite noun phrases/Determiner Phrases (or, simply, polydefinites), appositions, (pseudo)partitives, and evaluative appositives in the numerous studies that have been put forward to account for them over the past four decades or so. The peculiarity of these structures is the very presence of the second definite article that shows up whenever the modified noun itself is definite; at first sight, this ‘second’ article seems redundant, or expletive. Polydefiniteness has earned a privileged position in the literature, as has been discussed extensively and in depth over the past thirty years or so. The aim of this entry is to provide i. a description of the patterns that involve a noun and a modifier accompanied by its own definite article, and ii. a comprehensive survey of the relevant literature by highlighting commonalities and differences across the basic studies that have been written about polydefiniteness.