draft of November 2011

quantifier in (8).
(8) to aftokinito tu to asfalise kathe fititis
the car his-gen it insured-3sg each student-nom
Each student insured his car (distributive reading available).
Finally, clld-ed PPs don’t reconstruct in Italian (Cecchetto 2001).
In sum, there are at least three factors that may affect reconstruction: the number of the
dislocated element (7), its definiteness (8) and its category. 7 Under the scope approach, these
interactions are mysterious.
Topichood analyses Topics are often taken to necessarily involve well established dis-
course antecedents and, as a result, be compatible only with referential interpretations (Rein-
hart 1982; Alexopoulou and Kolliakou 2002; Endriss 2006). This explanation works for Greek
clld, since clld-ed phrases are necessarily referential topics (Philippaki-Warburton 1985;
Anagnostopoulou 1994; Tsimpli 1995; Rizzi 1997). However, Italian clld challenges the gen-
eralisation that topics are exclusively referential as we have seen in (1); the Greek Topicali-
sation examples in (5b) are equally problematic.
3 Beyond topics: nominals and anaphoric relations in Italian
and Greek
In this section we show that the clld facts mirror more general anaphoric possibilities in the
two languages, which in turn relate to the make up of the nominals in the two languages.
In particular, we draw evidence from the availability of Indefinite Argument Drop, Bare
subnominal deletion and bare nominals. The most important shortcoming of the scope-based
and topichood analyses reviewed in the previous section is that they could not capture the
more general patterns discussed below. We begin by looking at the basic contrast between
clld and Greek Topicalisation in some more detail.
7 The presence of modal operators further affects readings (Alexopoulou 2009).
8