Control and restructuring in Greek

Abstract

AbstractThe functional restructuring approach to exhaustive control is extended in this chapter to modern Greek. The chapter argues that in Greek, exhaustive control predicates instantiate monoclausal configurations whereas partial control predicates instantiate biclausal configurations. The key observation motivating this conclusion is that exhaustive control predicates in Greek impose severe restrictions on the range of tense, aspect, and agreement inflections the embedded verb may take, and independent support comes from emphatic polarity item licensing and inverse scope. The proposal entails two points of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation: first, some languages are like Greek in not distinguishing morphologically between nonpast and tenseless verb forms, whereas other languages are like English in making such a distinction. Second, some languages are like Greek in that Agr co-occurs with each verb in the clause, whereas other languages are like English in that Agr occurs just once per finite clause.