Clitics and Object Drop in Modern Greek

Metalanguage or bidialectism? acquisition of clitic placement by Hellenic Greeks, Greek Cypriots and binationals in the diglossic context of Cyprus

Acquisition of object clitics is one of the more investigated aspects of the largely understudied variety of Modern Greek spoken in the Republic of Cyprus. Previous studies on the acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek usually acknowledge that the linguistic reality in Cyprus involves a state of diglossia, where the sociolinguistically ‘high’ Standard Modern Greek co-exists with the ‘low’ Cypr...

The Acquisition of Clitic Objects in Modern Greek: Single Clitics, Clitic Doubling, Clitic Left Dislocation

Clitics and Clause Structure

In late Medieval Greek and many modern dialects, pronominal clitics are syntactically adjoined to an IP projection. In another set of dialects they have become syntactically adjoined to a verbal head. In the most innovating dialects (which include Standard Greek) they are agreement affixes. Extending the Fontana/Halpern clitic typology, we propose a trajectory of lexicalization from X clitics v...

Object clitics , definite articles and genitive possessive clitics in Greek specific language impairment ( SLI

Nine Greek preschool children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were compared to age-matched (CA) and language-matched (LA) typically-developing children on their production of a) third person object clitic pronouns, b) definite articles and c) genitive possessive clitics, through novel picture-based elicitation tasks. The aims were to examine whether these structures are impaired in Gree...

Clitics and Clause Structure: The Late Medieval Greek System

In Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001 we traced two paths of grammaticalization in the evolution of Greek clause structure: the reduction of Wackernagel (X) clitic pronouns to word-level affixes via an intermediate stage of word-level (X) clitics, and the emergence of auxiliaries and mood markers as heads of new functional projections. The two trajectories are connected in that the positioning of X cli...