Topic-strategies and the internal structure of nominal arguments in Greek and Italian∗

The paper investigates investigates how Italian and Greek employ Clitic Left Dislocation (clld) to encode discourse topics. Greek is sensitive to the definiteness/referentiality of the topic, employing clld exclusively for referential topics and resorting to Topicalisation for non-referential/property denoting topics. By contrast, clld is the main topic-strategy in Italian including non-referential/property denoting topics. This contrast is shown to mirror variation in more general patterns of anaphoric relations in the two languages, which, in turn, relate to the structure of nominal arguments: the fact that Greek non-referential indefinites systematically involve bare nouns which may be dropped rather than picked up by a pronoun in intrasentential anaphora contexts; the fact that Italian indefinites always involve a determiner and Italian pronouns can support property anaphora. The hypothesis is that the crosslignuistic variation in the anaphoric and clld patterns is the consequence of structural variation in the syntax of nominal arguments. Greek ∗We would like to thank the audiences of the following workshops and conferences: Funny Indefinites, June 2008, Berlin, LAGB, September 2009, Edinburgh, Bare Nouns, November 2009, Paris, Syntax Workshop of the Irish Network on Formal Syntax, February 2010, Belfast, Meditereanean Syntax, October 2010, Athens, On Linguistics Interfaces, December 2010, Belfast and Workshop on Current Issues in Semantics and Pragmatics, June 2011, York. Special thanks to George Tsoulas for discussion.