Please join us for a special talk by Lefteris Paparounas (UQAM) in connection with this semester’s Syntax 4 seminar. The talk will take place Friday March 22nd at 3:30pm in Education room 433. All are welcome!
Clitic doubling as Agree: Evidence from first conjunct clitic doubling in Greek
Lefteris Paparounas (joint work with Martin Salzmann)
We show that clitic doubling in Modern Greek has the syntax of a pure Agree(ment) dependency, without movement. The crucial evidence comes from a novel observation, namely, that Greek allows first conjunct clitic doubling, which movement-based approaches to doubling would incorrectly rule out as a violation of the Coordinate Structure Constraint. The resulting account leads to a number of new insights into Greek clitic doubling: it correctly predicts that clitic doubling never feeds binding, and enables an insightful reanalysis of observations previously seen as evidence in favor of movement. The overall picture that emerges is one where a morphophonologically `weak’ pronominal element (in this case, the doubling clitic) can correspond to an Agree dependency, echoing recent arguments in favor of this type of dissociation between the syntax and morphophonology of argument indexing (see e.g. Akkuş et al. submitted; Yuan 2021).
(For a paper-length version of this work, see Paparounas and Salzmann (2023).)