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Abstract
This dissertation concerns the nature of Modern Greek adverbial preverbs poly- ‘much-’, para- ‘over-’, kalo- ‘well-’, yper- ‘over-’, kata- ‘completely-’, kara- ‘extremely-’, psilo- ‘a little’, miso- ‘half-’, kοutso- ‘poorly’, psefto- ‘fake-’, xazo- ‘half-heartedly’, skylo- ‘to death’, xilio- ‘thousand-’, and mirio- ‘million-’. I argue that these bound degree modifiers appearing in a preverbal position have evaluative components related to the speaker’s stance towards the propositional content, as well as polarity properties.
The properties of meaning, conjoinability, nominalization, vowel deletion, and stress shift syntactically distinguish adverbial preverbs from prefixes, the other class of bound elements that show preverbal morphology. I provide a new syntactic account for the base position of preverbs that captures these properties of Modern Greek preverbs arguing that prefixes are introduced as Ps in [Spec, VP], whereas adverbial preverbs are introduced as Advs in [Spec, FP]. Taking also into consideration other elements that can be part of the verbal complex, like the past augment e-, I propose that the formation of preverbed verbal complexes in Modern Greek is subject to three mechanisms, namely Generalized Head Movement (Arregi & Pietraszko 2018, 2019), Merger (Matushansky 2006, Harizanov 2014, Martinović 2019), and Doubling.
Within the (Non)Veridicality Theory of Polarity (Giannakidou 1994, 1997, 1998, 2001, et seq.), the bound morpheme poly- ‘much-’ functions as a strong Negative Polarity Item appearing only in antiveridical contexts. Its licensing happens only locally and is accomplished syntactically via Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001).
Interestingly, I argue that the presence of para-, kalo-, yper-, kata-, kara-, psilo-, miso-, kousto-, psefto-, xazo-, skylo-, xilio-, and mirio- is limited in veridical environments, and that they are bound degree PPIs. I present more evidence for their distribution showing that they fall under the class of weak PPIs having more flexibility regarding nonveridical operators and escaping the scope of antiveridical ones. Their polarity sensitivity efficiently holds under the notions of speaker’s commitment and subjectivity, formulated within the (Non)veridicality Theory of Polarity, taking into consideration nonveridical contexts where the truth of a proposition may be disputed by the speaker.
Modern Greek adverbial preverbs also exhibit evaluative properties. I show that the elements para-, kalo-, yper-, kata-, skylo-, xilio-, and mirio- are intensifying morphemes: they are distinguished into boosters (para-, yper-, and kalo-) denoting a high degree on a scale, and maximizers (kata-, skylo-, xilio-, and mirio-) denoting the upper boundaries on a degree scale. By contrast, the adverbial preverbs poly-, psilo-, miso-, koutso-, psefto-, and xazo-, expressing deintensification, are gradable modifiers that fall mostly under the class of diminishers. The different functions of the adverbials are defined formally in a unified semantic analysis treating them not as individual elements, but rather as semantic classes. In addition, the Greek adverbial preverbs exhibit a behavior, similar to that of metalinguistic comparatives: they have a preferential attitude with a negativity expressive component.
This research concerning preverbal morphology in Modern Greek arouses interest due to evaluative and polarity properties up to today not discovered.
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