Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
A discourse-based account of weak crossover effect
by Dora Alexopoulou
This paper discusses minimal pairs of constructions differing in the absence vs presence of an object clitic. In the absence of a clitic the data display weak crossover effect (wco) whereas coindexing is allowed once a clitic is inserted. The paper illustrates how syntactic constraints, Information Packaging and the `semantics' of the NPs involved interact to block or allow coindexing.
The data are from Greek, a free order language which marks subjects and objects morphologically, for nominative and accusative respectively. In addition, it allows object NPs to co-occur with accusative clitics in Clitic Doubling and Clitic Left Dislocation constructions
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 01:01 BST