The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 23 October 2012.
Speaker: Allison Kirk (LUCL)
Title: The diachrony of Greek relative clauses
Time: 15:15-17:00
Venue: Lipsius/2.35c
Abstract
This talk focuses on changes in the structure of relative clauses (RCs) from Ancient to Modern Greek, with discussion of five periods of Greek: Homeric (texts from 8th century BC), Classical (texts from 5th century BC), Koine (texts from 1st century), Medieval (texts from 7th – 10th centuries) and currently spoken Modern Greek. From Homeric Greek until middle Koine Greek, headed relatives equivalent to ‘the boy who I saw is tall’ are attested alongside correlatives equivalent to ‘which boy I saw, this one is tall’. In Modern Greek, the former are predominant and the latter are almost obsolete. It has been claimed that the correlative is the ‘predecessor’ of the headed relative in the related language Latin, as a result of a series of syntactic re-analyses (Bianchi 2000). The goal is to provide synchronic analyses of RCs in the various stages of Greek and then determine the pathways for the changes. In particular, I argue that headed relatives from Homeric to (middle) Koine Greek are not embedded under main clause NP ‘heads’, but that the RCs are all adjoined to main clauses in these stages. I argue for a standard head-raising approach to Modern Greek RCs, and that that the changes in structures correspond to changes in the lexico-syntactic properties relative morphemes. In particular, the re-analysis of the old relative pronoun from a maximal projection to a Dº category corresponds to the new embedded head-external RC. This re-analysis also corresponds to the loss of XP ‘splitting’ in RCs.
Throughout the talk I will address various methodological issues in diachronic syntax and current theories of syntactic change, and when applied to the Greek facts, what they contribute to the longstanding observation that there is a unidirectional ‘cline’ from ‘paratactic’ to ‘hypotactic’ sentence structures (Hopper 1993, among others).