Cypriot Greek Clitics and Their Positioning Restrictions

Abstract

This paper is a study of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek (CGr) fmite clauses.² Its primary purpose is to provide a systematic description of the positions in which pronominal clitics surface in CGr, compare them with the counterpart structures of Standard Greek (SGr), and attempt to offer a formal account of the differences in clitic positioning between the two varieties. It will be shown that the ban on first position clitics that CGr demonstrates is unlike that manifested by the Slavic (the sometimes-called Wackernagel) languages. Rather, the environments from which CGr pronominal clitics are excluded are similar, although not identical, to those of Portuguese and Galician.³ A central claim that will be advanced is that clitics adjoin to a functional head that occupies the same position in the clausal structure in both CGr and SGr; the fact that they often surface in a different position in each variety is seen as the result of the overt movement which the fmite verb undergoes in CGr. I consider M⁰ (the head of M(ood) P(hrase)) as the landing site of fmite verb movement and conjecture that V-to-M movement is related to the licensing requirements of CGr clitics which, unlike those of their SGr counterparts, have to be satisfied before spell-out.

Research for this paper was conducted when I was a postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa and was funded by SSHRCC Grant 410-91-0178. I would like to thank Richard Kayne, Maria Luisa Vivero and two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. My deepest thanks to Kakia Petinou (CUNY/Speech and Hearing), Pavlos Pavlou (Georgetown/Linguistics) and Kiriakos Savvas (Ottawa) for patiently providing most of the Cypriot Greek data.