Nikolaos Lavidas

Null vs. cognate objects and language contact: Evidence from Hellenistic Greek

Both “pleonastic” clitics instead of referential null objects and cognate objects in the Septuagint and the New Testament have been analyzed as resulting from contact between Greek and Hebrew. We examine the hypothesis of Hebrew interference and argue that the syntactic characteristics of Hebrew of referential overt objects and activity/event noun cognate objects are not transferred directly to Greek. We propose a second hypothesis according to which language contact (between Biblical Hebrew and Greek) results in semantic changes and these semantic changes affect transitivity. The semantic changes related to language contact concern the aspectual features of Greek: the development of the verbal aspect in Greek from expression of situation-type oppositions to expression of viewpoint (+/ − perfective) aspect oppositions can explain the changes observed in transitivity in Hellenistic Greek.

On the relation between labilizations and neuter gender: Evidence from the Greek diachrony

Abstract This paper considers labile verbs, i.e., verbs that use the same morphology for the causative and the anticausative reading, and how this lability pattern has evolved and spread in relation to case alignment and, specifically, to the lack of case distinctions between the nominative and the accusative with neuter DPs. In the first part of the study, we examine the voice distinctions in the history of the Greek language, showing that the use of the same voice morphology (i.e., active) for causative and anticausative readings increases in Hellenistic Greek and spreads progressively until Early Modern Greek, as indicated by empirical evidence in dialectal texts. The second part of the study attributes this pattern to the lack of the nominative-accusative case distinction in neuter nouns that in turn can be interpreted as either objects of a transitive (causative) verb or subjects of an intransitive verb (anticausative). In this aspect, neuter nouns demonstrate a type of split ergativity in the Greek labile alternations which thus require a split ergativity analysis based on DP features.

Passives in the history of Greek: Evidence for the role of the passive suffix

The article examines a change in passive constructions in the diachrony of Greek: the use of the nonactive suffix as a specialized marker of passive constructions is a later development in Greek, starting from Late Hellenistic/ Early Byzantine. Evidence is provided mainly by examples of active passives and nonactive transitives in Ancient Greek but not in later periods. The historical data provide arguments in favor of an analysis that postulates the presence of the external argument in passive constructions in the same position as in transitive constructions, and blocking by the nonactive suffix either of (a) one of the internal arguments (Ancient Greek) or (b) the internal argument in the accusative case (Late Hellenistic/Early Byzantine).