Speaker: Anastasia Tsilia (MIT)
Title: Hidden causality in Modern Greek
Time: Wednesday, April 26th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: We investigate certain Modern Greek attitudinal constructions, where an attitude verb takes an ACC DP as an argument, which is then referred to by a pronoun in the subject or the object position of the embedded clause. Here is an example of this construction:
(1) I Maria theli ton Yani_i [na pro_i aghapai mono aftin].
The.nom Maria.nom want.prs the.acc Yani.acc [subj pro love only her.acc]
‘Maria wants Yanis to only love her’
We argue that the ACC DP does not move from the lower clause (see Hadjivassiliou et al. (2000); Kotzoglou and Papangeli (2007); Kotzoglou (2013, 2017)), but is rather base-generated in a different clause. Given that it also has to co-refer with a pronoun in the subject or object position of embedded clause, we argue that this is an instance of prolepsis. Surprisingly, despite being seemingly outside of the scope of the attitude verb, the ACC DP can be read de dicto:
(2) 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 tris prasinus skilus [na erthun sto parti]. The.nom Petros.dim want.prs three green.acc dog.acc [subj come to-the party]. `Little Petros wants three green dogs to come to the party.’
On top of that, there is a semantic requirement that the ACC DP is part of the cause of the complement clause. We discuss this requirement and provide a clausal analysis, inspired by intensional transitive verbs (den Dikken et al.2018), arguing that there is a covert clause boundary between the matrix and the complement clause, featuring a weak causative CAUSE:
(3) …want [proleptic-DP CAUSE [CP…]]
Under such an analysis, the de dicto readings of the proleptic DP follow naturally, since it is in the scope of the attitude verb.