draft of November 2011

(5) a. Fetos i moda ine apesia; idika i bluzes ine aparadektes
I hate this year’s fashion; the blouses are especially outrageous.
b. mia kokini bluza psahno edo ki ena mina ke de boro na vro
a red blouse her.cl look-for-1sg here and one month and not can subj
puthena kamia pu na m’aresi
find-1sg anywhere anyone that subj me like-3sg
A red blouse I’ve been looking for for a month now and I cannot find one that I
like.
(Alexopoulou and Kolliakou 2002, ex.51)
So, while the hypothesis that clld and Topicalisation are different PF realisations of the
same structure can elegantly capture the variation between English and Italian, the Greek
facts are problematic, since this language has two distinct syntactic structures for topics,
namely Topicalisation and clld, a fact that indicates that the presence of the pronominal
has interpretative consequences. We turn to the discussion of the differences between these
two languages next.
The minimal pairs in Italian (1) and Greek (3)&(5) illustrate a contrast between Italian
and Greek topic-strategies. Italian employs clld as the main topic-strategy, regardless of the
referentiality of the dislocated topic. Greek, by contrast, employs clld only for referential top-
ics; non-referential topics undergo Topicalisation. The present paper investigates the source
of this contrast. Our analysis builds on the insight of Rizzi (1997),Cinque (1990), Anagnos-
topoulou (1994) and Tsimpli (1999) according to which clld is characterised by the absence
of quantifier-variable chain and the presennce of an anaphoric link between the dislocated
phrase and the pronominal. Indeed we demonstrate that clld mirrors general anaphoric
possibilities between pronouns and their antecedents in the two languages. We show that
the contrast regarding clld is not an isolated fact, but rather, is linked to a further set of
empirical contrasts regarding the availability of Indefinite Argument Drop, bare subnominal
ellipsis and the availability of bare nouns in the two languages. The emerging patterns indi-
cate strongly that variation is these contexts is linked to variation in the internal structure of
the nominals and pronouns involved. Our central claim is that all relevant contrasts can be
reduced to one: the absence of a D-layer from Greek nominal arguments and the hypothesis
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