draft of November 2011

4 Analysis
4.1 Greek nominal arguments are Number Phrases
Since Horrocks and Stavrou (1987), Greek nominal arguments are assumed to be DPs (see
also Stavrou 1991). This view remains dominant in the Greek literature to date, modulo
Kolliakou’s work on Greek definites (Kolliakou 2003) and two proposals for treating some
cases of Greek bare nouns as NPs by Tomioka (2003) and Tsimpli and Papadopoulou (2005).
In this section we provide arguments that Greek nominals are Number Phrases without a
D layer. We begin our discussion with bare nouns in section 4.1.1 and then move to nominals
with articles and quantifiers in section 4.1.3.
4.1.1 Bare nouns in Greek
We hypothesise the structure in (23). We need to show two things: first, that bare nouns are
arguments and not incorporated properties. Second, that no D layer is needed.
(23) a. aghorasa vivlia
bought-1sg books
I bought books.
VP
✟❍
✟
✟ ❍
❍
b. V NumP
aghorasa
✟ ✟ ❍
❍
Num NP
+Pl
N
vivlia
Morphology In terms of their morphology, bare nominals are marked for case, gender
and number just like any other argument, in contrast to incorporated arguments which,
crosslinguistically, may show reduced morphology (Farkas and de Swarts 2003).
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