draft of November 2011

generalisation is that only languages without articles, allow Left Branch Extraction (LBE);
thus, LBE is ungrammatical in English (51a), but available in Serbo Croatian (51b).
(51) a. *Expensive/*ThatI he saw [ti car]
b. Skupa/Tai je vidio [ti kola] (Serbo Croatian)
expensive/that is seen car
(From Bo˘sković 2008, ex.3-4)
Greek does allow LBE (as also noted by Boskovic). The grammaticality of (52a) is not
surprising, given that we are analysing bare nominals like akrivo aftokinito as NumPs. 17 The
crucial assumption is that there is no DP layer, which, according to Bo˘sković (2008) is a phase
blocking extraction.
(52) akrivo aghorase aftokinito
expensive baught-3sg car
He bought an expensive car.
Cases with a demonstrative are more interesting since, as we’ve seen, a demonstrative like
afto (=this) necessarily involves the definite article. As can be seen in (53), the demonstrative
can be extracted out of the nominal, indicating that afto to aftokinito is in fact a noun phrase.
(53) afto aghorase to aftokinito
this bought-3sg the car
She bought this car.
The crucial fact here is that the presence of the article does not affect the extraction possibili-
ties. So if we consider a nominal involving a demonstrative and an adjective like afto to akrivo
aftokinito (=this the expensive car) we see in (54) that the demonstrative+article+adjective
can undergo left extraction.
(54) afto to akrivo aghorase aftokinito
this the expensive bought car
17 All LBE examples are pragmatically marked; here we assume that at least one element of the extracted
phrase bears the sentential stress as indicated by the small caps.
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