draft of November 2011

. belle lo sono?
beautiful it are
Beautiful they are.
In sum then, the hypothesis that D is the nominalisor in Italian while Greek nominals
are NumPs can account for the rich inventory of D elements in Italian as well as the weaker
definite semantics of D elements in this language.
4.2 Indefinite Argument Drop and Bare Subnominal Ellipsis
As Giannakidou and Merchant (1997) show, Greek Indefintie Argument Drop (IAD) in-
volves recycling of the descriptive content of the antecedent (or property anaphora in terms
of Tomioka 2003).Crucially, it does not pick the discourse referent of the antecedent. 26 Con-
sider (69). Example (69a) does not allow a reading in which Nafsika dried the dishes Napoleo-
das washed, a reading available in (69b) where the pronoun is used. On the basis of the
obligatoriness of the disjoint reading in (69a), Giannakidou and Merchant (1997) conclude
that an empty pro analysis, proposed by Dimitriadis (1994) is not possible, since it would
predict the co-referential reading in (69b). What IAD involves in (69a) is the recycling of
the descriptive content of the antecedent, i.e. piata but not the specific set introduced by the
antecedent.
(69) a. o Napoleodas epline piata ke i Nafsika skupise
the-nom Napoleodas-nom washed-3sg dishes and the-nom Nafsika dried-sg
Napoleon washed dishes and Nafsika dried dishes. (Disjoint reading)
26 See Giannakidou and Merchant (1997) for a detailed discussion of the properties of IAD. Panagiotidis
(2002) excludes a VP-ellips analysis of the phenomenon; his main argument is that all restrictions relevant to
IAD involve the nominal antecedent and never any verbal element. Further, examples like (i), where only the
object is dropped but other parts of the VP are overt indicate that what is dropped is just the object.
(i) ti mia mera vrike dulia o Yorgos stu Zografu ke to epomeno proi
the one day found-3sg job the-nom Yorgos-nom at-the Zografu and the next morning
vrike i Maria stin Kesariani
found-3sg the-nom Maria at-the Kesariani
One day Yorgos found a job at Zografu and the next morning Maria found one at Kesariani.
38