draft of November 2011

that the definite is a noun phrase. 19
(58) pianu martira arnithikan na eksetasun tin katathesi
who-gen witness-gen refused-3pl subj examine-3pl the-acc testimony
Whose witness testimony did they refuse to examine?
The facts reviewed in this section 20 indicate strongly that the Greek article does not behave
like a D head while there is evidence that definite nominals allow extraction possibilities typical
of noun phrases that are not DPs. 21 We will, therefore, assume that the article is not a D
head, but rather a prenominal modifier and that Greek nominals, definite and indefinite, are
uniformingly Number Phrases. 22 Definites then are just definite Number Phrases. Further,
19 Horrocks and Stavrou (1987) in fact use this type of evidence to argue for a DP; they link long possessor
extraction as in (58) with focus movement within the nominal as in (i). They argue that tu protu martira
in (i) moves to a position internal to the nominal exactly like the wh-phrase in (58) moves to CP. They take
the article to be a D head allowing focus-movement to its Spec. While examples like (i) necessitate movement
internal to the nominal, it is not necessary that this is to Spec,DP as we will see shortly.
(i) arnithikan na eksetasun tu protu martira tin katathesi
refused-3pl subj examine-3pl the-gen first-gen the-acc testimony
They refused to examine the first witness’s testimony.
20 We note that, unsurprisingly, Italian patterns with English and DP languages with regard to the diagnostics
proposed by Bo˘sković (2008).
21 Bo˘sković (2008) discusses some further generalisations which are either not relevant for Greek (e.g. supe-
riority effects for multiple wh-fronting) or are trivially relevant: for instance, Greek most is i perissoteri (=the
most), that is it implicates the definite article and has the expected reading of more than half; in addition,
Greek allows clitic doubling since it has articles. Boskovic links clitic doubling to the existence of DPs and,
indeed takes the referentiality of clitic doubling structures as a consequence of the involvement of D. The
facts discussed in this paper are a counter example to these correlations. Firstly, Italian, which clearly has
DPs allows non-referential readings, whereas Greek, which certainly allows NPs does not allow non-referential
readings in doubling structures.
22 This is not too far from Kolliakou (2003) who takes the definite to be an argument of a noun appearing at
its Spec. Further, she assumes that definite and indefinite nominals are all noun phrases; in her HPSG analysis,
any lexical category specified for the head feature nom (in turn specified for number, gender and case) can
project a nominal; apart from nouns, articles, numerals and adjective share this head feature reflecting the
fact that any of these categories can project a nominal argument on its own.
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