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draft of November 2011

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3.3 Bare nouns<br />

As has become evident, many <strong>of</strong> the critical examples in Greek involve bare nouns. In fact, bare<br />

nouns are very widely available in Greek (19), in contrast to Italian, where their distribution<br />

is restricted (Benincà 1980; Longobardi 1994; Chierchia 1998). Crucially for the present<br />

discussion, a bare noun is ungrammatical in examples like (20) where Greek naturally prefers<br />

a bare noun.<br />

(19) a. i Maria vrike dada gia ta pedhia<br />

the-nom Maria found nanny for the children<br />

Maria found a nanny for the children.<br />

b. mpikan kleftes ke sikosan ta pada<br />

broke-in-3pl burglars and lifted-3pl the all<br />

Burglars broke in and took everything.<br />

c. diadilotes pirpolisan magazia ke aftokinita stus dromus yiro apo<br />

demonstrators set-on-fire shops and cars in-the streets around from<br />

to Politehnio<br />

the Politehnio<br />

Demonstrators set on fire shops and cars in the streets around the School <strong>of</strong><br />

Engineering.<br />

The Italian counterparts <strong>of</strong> Greek (19a) and (15) resist bare nouns as shown in (20).<br />

(20) a. Maria ha trovato una baby-sitter/*baby-sitter per i bambini<br />

Maria has found a nanny/*nanny for the children<br />

Maria found a nanny for the children.<br />

b. Gianni sta cercando un idraulico/*idraulico.<br />

Gianni is looking-for a plumber/*plumber<br />

Gianni is looking for a plumber.<br />

3.4 Bare subnominal ellipsis<br />

The final set <strong>of</strong> observations comes from another context <strong>of</strong> intrasentential anaphora which<br />

gives rise to the deletion <strong>of</strong> the nominal antecedent. Consider (21). In the answer, the noun<br />

tavolo is elided; the nominal is headed by uno which consists <strong>of</strong> the indefinite article and the<br />

classifier o, followed by the adjective (Alexiadou and Gengel 2008). In addition, the elliptical<br />

13

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