draft of November 2011

You will need a skirt sewn in India/ a clean skirt.
c. ehi arosto pedhi/ehi psilo gkomeno
has ill child/has tall boyfriend
S/he has an ill child/a tall boyfriend.
Discourse transparency Finally, bare nouns can introduce discourse referents (31), that
is, they can be discourse transparent (Farkas and de Swarts 2003), a fact which, as pointed out
by Kolliakou (2003), indicates that D is not necessary in Greek for referential interpretations.
(31) telika vrike dada; ti gnorisame htes sto parti tis
finally found-3sg nanny; her.cl met-1pl
Yotas
Yota-gen
yesterday at-the party the-gen
He finally found a nanny; we met her yesterday at Yota’s party.
The facts reviewed so far indicate that bare nouns in Greek are fully fledged arguments
both in terms of their morphosyntax as well as their semantic interpretations. In addition,
the contrasts with Catalan, clearly indicate that not only plurals, but singular bare nouns
have Number. We have to assume then that these nominals are minimally Number Phrases
(alternatively, they can be Noun Phrases necessarily marked for Number).
The next question is whether we should assume a null D head above NumP. Our answer
is negative. The first set of facts arguing against a null D comes from scope.
Scopal inertia Greek bare nouns exhibit the scopal inertia standardly exhibited by their
crosslinguistic counterparts (Chierchia 1998; Farkas and de Swarts 2003).
Examples involving the indefinite article like (32b) and (33b) are ambiguous: the former
allows a transparent or de re reading and an opaque or de dicto reading while (33b) additionally
allows the 3rd reading according to which Maria is looking for a specific type of Armani skirt.
On the other hand, the bare nouns in the (a) examples allow only the opaque readings.
(32) a. i Maria theli na padrefti Italo
the-nom Maria want-3sg subj marry-3sg Italian
Maria wants to marry an Italian. (only opaque reading)
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