The morphosyntax of the periphrastic future under negation in Cypriot Greek

Jason Merchant,Natalia Pavlou

doi:10.1163/15699846-01702005

Abstract

In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha, which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a verb and the head of its C complement.

Highlights

Via free access the morphosyntax of the periphrastic future person copula with a clause headed by the subordinating particle na3 and a verb in the non-past: (3) En na pao
15 This move is presaged in part by a weaker definition offered in Abels and Muriungi (2008:719), who propose a version of a span that includes the selectional requirement but jettisons the requirement that the heads be in an extended projection: “We suggest that a morpheme can realize a stretch of functional heads; by a stretch we mean one or more heads that select each other’s maximal projections.”
The variation of the Cypriot Greek periphrastic future en na∼tha presents a puzzle for standard spanning theory, where spans are restricted to extended projections

Summary

The future and negation in Cypriot Greek

1.1 The periphrastic future: copula+na Cypriot Greek, like its Standard Modern Greek sister spoken primarily to its northwest across the Mediterranean, has a copula verb that inflects for person, number, and tense, but shows no number distinction in the third person:. This verb is used with adjectival, nominal, and prepositional predicates:. Cypriot Greek has a two-way tense distinction morphologically represented: past and non-past (see Holton et al 1997 for more detail on the identical standard Greek system), and two aspects: imperfective and perfective It marks the future periphrastically, using a construction that the (here invariant) 3rd. Merchant and pavlou the syntactic structure of the periphrastic future which combines these two elements, is to put them together in the usual way, with the verb en selecting a phrase headed by na, as illustrated in the following simplified structure (where we suppress the representation of verb movement to t, as well as of other elements possibly present in the clause):

CP en

Additional issues and questions

Mood TP tha

Conclusion