Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

LF Reading Group (11/9) - Anastasia Tsilia (MIT)

Date and time: Wednesday 11/02, 1-2pm
In-person location: 32-D461
Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94298987190

Title:  ”Quasi-ECM” constructions in Modern Greek: Evidence for semantic lowering

Abstract:

MG displays certain attitudinal constructions where an attitude verb may take an accusative object (henceforth ACC DP) followed by a subjunctive CP. Kotzoglou and Papangeli (2007) dub this the “quasi-ECM” construction. The basic pattern is the following:

(1)
I Maria theli ton Yani /o Yanis [na tin aghapai].
The.nom Maria.nom want.prs the.acc Yani.acc /the.nom Yani.nom [comp her.acc love.subj].
`Maria wants John to only love her.’

Hadjivassiliou et al. (2000); Kotzoglou and Papangeli (2007); Kotzoglou (2013, 2017) provide considerable evidence that the ACC DP is base-generated in the matrix clause. We provide additional arguments that this is indeed the case, and we argue that these are proleptic constructions as opposed to object control​. Contrary to what is usually assumed in the literature, given the right context, the pro can be in object position too:

(2) Context: Yanis is a political activist and part of an organization run by me. I want to raise awareness about
the organization and I think that getting someone arrested will give us some publicity to this end. 

Thelo ton Yani [na ton silavi i astinomia].
Want.prs the.acc Yani.acc [comp him.acc arrest.subj the.nom police.nom].
`I want the police to arrest Yanis.’

Cross-linguistically, prolepsis marks a de re (e.g. German (Salzmann, 2017), Nez Perce (Deal, 2018)) or a de re and a third reading (e.g. Tiwa (Dawson and Deal, 2019)). We argue that in MG de dicto readings are also possible:

(3) Context: Little Petros is in kindergarten and he and his friends believe that green dogs exist. One day they are talking about green dogs and Petros bets that exactly three of them will show up at his party.

O Petrakis theli akrivos tris prasinus skilus [na erthun sto parti].
The Petros.dim want.prs exactly three.pl green.acc.pl dog.acc.pl [comp come.subj.pl in-the party]. 
`Little Petros wants exactly three green dogs to come to the party.’

This attitude report does not commit the speaker to the existence of green dogs; in Fodor’s terms (Fodor, 1970), the embedded subject is read opaquely. Thus, proleptic constructions are not always interpreted transparently, contrary to what has been assumed up to now. 

We provide an analysis in terms of semantic lowering, as well as argue that prolepsis in Modern Greek still has more restricted truth conditions than its non-proleptic equivalent derived from movement. Namely, there is a requirement that the DP is part of what causes the CP to happen. So, (1) with the ACC is only felicitous if Yanis takes some kind of action to m​ake the CP hold. ​This suggests that prolepsis is not simply a mechanism to exclude de dicto readings, but a way to express some marked meaning in general (which we formalise for Modern Greek). Finally, we hint at an implicational hierarchy of prolepsis, suggesting that if a language has a de dicto reading, then it also has a third and a de re one.