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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2021
This paper studies the structure and origin of prenominal and postnominal restrictive relative clauses in Pharasiot Greek. Though both patterns are finite and introduced by the invariant complementizer tu, they differ in two important respects. First, corpus data reveal that prenominal relatives are older than their postnominal counterparts. Second, in the present-day language only prenominal relatives involve a matching derivation, whereas postnominal ones behave like Head-raising structures. Turning to diachrony, we suggest that prenominal relatives came into being through morphological fusion of a determiner t- with an invariant complementizer u. This process entailed a reduction of functional structure in the left periphery of the relative clause, to the effect that the landing site for a raising Head was suppressed, leaving a matching derivation as the only option. Postnominal relatives are analyzed as borrowed from Standard Modern Greek. Our analysis corroborates the idea that both raising and matching derivations for relatives must be acknowledged, sometimes even within a single language.
We thank the audience at the 18th Diachronic Generative Syntax conference (DiGS 18) in Ghent, our former colleagues at GIST (Ghent University), three anonymous referees and the editor of Journal of Linguistics, as well as Guglielmo Cinque, Liliane Haegeman, Mark Janse, Nikos Liosis, Io Manolessou, Anna Roussou, and Ioanna Sitaridou for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also indebted to Andreas Konstantinidis, his family, Konstantinos Kalaitzidis and the inhabitants of Vathylakkos (Kozani) and Platy (Imathia) for making this research possible. Finally, our deepest gratitude is to our informants: Anastasia, Despoina†, Eirini, Evlambia, Georgios, Grigoris, Katerina, Leftheris, Maria, Nikos, Prodromos, Sofia†, Theodorakis† and Thanasis. M. Bagriacik’s work was funded by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO 12Q0719N) and by the Boğaziçi University Research Funds (BAP 21B12SUP1).