Metin Bagriacik

Representing discourse in clausal syntax : the ki particle in Pharasiot Greek

In Pharasiot Greek, an Asia Minor Greek dialect, a certain particle copied from Turkish, ki, is employed in a number of seemingly unrelated constructions. Close scrutiny, however, reveals that in each of these constructions, ki is employed as a device geared to influencing the interlocutor’s epistemic vigilance. Based on the Cartographic Approach which defends the syntactization of the interpretive domains, I propose that this unique semantics of ki should be represented in the clause structure. Following recent work which advocates the existence of a pragmatic field—Speech Act Phrase (SAP) in particular—above the CP-layer, where discourse and pragmatic roles are mapped onto syntax, I propose that ki is the overt exponent of SA 0 and is further endowed with a [+ sentience] feature indexing the speaker as the sentient mind. The apparent differences between various construction types which involve ki—hence, in which SAP projects—then reduce to whether the [+ sentience] feature on SA 0 is checked by an internally or externally merging category in Spec, SAP.

Phrasal vs. morphological compounds: Insights from Modern Greek and Turkish

Abstract In this paper, we compare Modern Greek nominal compounds to their Turkish counterparts and reveal that Modern Greek nominal compounds under investigation are morphological while Turkish ones are syntactically built. Based on this, we offer an explanation for the availability of phrasal compounds in Turkish but not in Modern Greek: phrase-level items can be involved in syntactic compounds, but not in morphological compounds involving solely morphological items. The study reveals that the locus of compound formation is not confined to a single module both cross-linguistically and within a language, but the locus of a specific type of compound in a language entails whether or not phrasal compounds with the same compound structure can also occur in that specific language.