3.1 Direct vs. indirect modification adjectives

The distinction between direct and indirect modification (by adjectives) goes back to Sproat & Shih (1988, 1991). By using the term “direct modification”, Sproat & Shih refer to an adjective directly modifying the noun, without the mediation of another constituent (i.e. a clause). In contrast, an adjective is assumed to indirectly modify the noun when it is contained within a (relative) clause.

This distinction was subsequently taken up by other linguists, especially those working in the cartographic framework, and was employed as a vehicle conveying two—originally unrelated though theoretically connected—conceptual oppositions: one is a syntactic opposition that concerns the placement of the adjective with respect to the noun (the pre-/postnominal opposition); the other represents the semantic opposition between attribution and predication (Bolinger 1967). Combining these distinctions was just a matter of time. Direct modification was correlated with the prenominal position of adjectives (“i.e. the use of the adjective as a noun modifier located within the boundaries of a nominal phrase”; Alexiadou et al. 2007: 291) and also with (semantic) attribution. Indirect modification was correlated with the postnominal position (the adjective as an indirect modifier originating within a relative clause) and, for obvious reasons, with predication (“the adjective heads an A[djective]P[hrase], which constitutes the predicate of the clause, taking the nominal phrase as its (external) subject”; Alexiadou et al. 2007: 290). Such associations were encouraged by the old transformational tradition of the 1960s whereby the pre- and the postnominal position of adjectives was regularly connected via the combined effect of dedicated rules (Smith 1964).

The “derivational relationship between the two adjective positions” (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 290) was initially addressed through two different approaches. According to the “reductionist” approach (see Alexiadou et al. 2007: 290–296), there exists only one underlying position (originally assumed to be postnominal: more precisely, all adjectives are assumed to originate within relative clauses and to be deep complements of the article), while the other is derived via movement: in the earlier proposals, the prenominal position is derived via leftward movement of the adjective from its originally postnominal position. However, it was soon realized that reducing all adjectives to the same source faced serious problems (Jackendoff 1977, among others, although most of those problems had been noticed already by Bolinger 1967). Thus, the 1980s witnessed an interesting twist: according to the “separationist” approach, different positions on the linear axis were associated with different underlying structures, and with different clusters of readings for the adjective. Thus, the class of adjectives was basically split: certain (sub-classes of) adjectives were assumed to be generated prenominally, while certain others postnominally (occasionally with overlaps).

The issue of adjective placement cannot be treated in detail here, as we focus on a specific phenomenon and its geographic distribution, i.e., the loss of polydefiniteness in the Greek varieties of Southern Italy. The reader is referred to Alexiadou et al. (2007) and Cinque (2010) for extensive discussion and relevant references.

What should be mentioned at this point, albeit briefly, is the very content of the terms “direct” and “indirect” modification. What seems to be a point of consensus today, even if the implementation of even common assumptions may differ,¹² is that adjectives instantiating direct modification display the following semantic properties: they are enduring/individual-level, non-restrictive, modal, non-intersective, absolute, and specificity-inducing (Cinque 2010). In contrast, adjectives instantiating indirect modification encode the conceptually opposite readings: they are stage-level, restrictive, manner-denoting with an implicit relative clause reading, intersective, relative, and non-specificity-inducing (Cinque 2010).

Especially in the cartographic approach, it has been assumed that these two opposing sets of interpretations are strictly connected to the position of the adjective with respect to the head noun:¹³ “if one and the same adjective shows up in both positions it is given two different interpretations, one for each position” (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 287).

Here, we provide examples from Italian, a language that is typically used in the literature to illustrate these phenomena.¹⁴ For instance, the examples in (1) are often employed to show that, in Italian and Romance more generally, the prenominal position is strictly connected to direct modification. The most natural meanings for the prenominal adjectives in the sentences listed in (1) are indeed those associated with direct modification: enduring/individual-level (1a), non-restrictive (1b), modal (1c), non-intersective (1d), absolute (1e), and specificity-inducing (1f) (Cinque 2010: 7–13).

(1)

a.

le	invisibili	stelle	di	Andromeda	esercitano	un	grande	fascino
the	invisible	stars	of	Andromeda	have	a	great	fascination

‘Andromeda’s stars, which are generally invisible, have a great fascination’ (individual-level)

# ‘Andromeda’s generally visible stars, which happen to be invisible now, have a great fascination’ (stage-level)

b.

le	noiose	lezioni	di	Ferri	se	le	ricordano	tutti
the	boring	classes	of	Ferri	SE	them	remember	all

‘everybody remembers Ferri’s classes, all of which were boring’ (non-restrictive)

# ‘everybody remembers just those classes by Ferri that were boring’ (restrictive)

c.

Maria	ha	intervistato	ogni	possibile	candidato
Maria	has	interviewed	every	possible	candidate

‘Maria interviewed every potential candidate’ (modal)

# ‘Maria interviewed every candidate that it was possible for her to interview’ (implicit relative clause reading)

d.

un	buon	attaccante	non	farebbe	mai	una	cosa	del genere
a	good	forward	not	would-do	never	a	thing	of-the kind

‘a forward good at playing forward would never do such a thing’ (non-intersective)

# ‘a good-hearted forward would never do such a thing’ (intersective)

e.

gli	altissimi	edifici	di	New York	colpiscono	tutti
the	very-tall	buildings	of	New York	strike	all

‘New York’s buildings, which are very tall objects, impress everybody’ (absolute)

#‘New York’s buildings, which are very tall compared to the average height of buildings, impress everybody’ (relative)

f.

domani	alla	festa	so	che	interverrà	un	famoso	attore
tomorrow	at-the	party	I-know	that	will-intervene	a	famous	actor

‘tomorrow, I know that a certain famous actor will come to the party’ (specific)

#‘tomorrow, I know that some famous actor or other will come to the party’ (nonspecific)

In contrast, the examples in (2) suggest that the postnominal position is compatible both with the interpretations associated with direct modification and with those associated with indirect modification: stage-level (2a), restrictive (2b), manner-denoting with an implicit relative clause reading (2c), intersective (1d), relative (2e), ans non-specificity inducing (2f) (Cinque 2010: 7–13).

(2)

a.

le	stelle	invisibili	di	Andromeda	esercitano	un	grande	fascino
the	stars	invisible	of	Andromeda	have	a	great	fascination

‘Andromeda’s generally visible stars, which happen to be invisible now, have a great fascination’ (stage-level)

Additional meaning available in this position: ‘Andromeda’s stars, which are generally invisible, have a great fascination’ (individual-level)

b.

le	lezioni	noiose	di	Ferri	se	le	ricordano	tutti
the	classes	boring	of	Ferri	SE	them	remember	all

‘everybody remembers just those classes by Ferri that were boring’ (restrictive)

Additional meaning available in this position: ‘everybody remembers Ferri’s classes, all of which were boring’ (non-restrictive)

c.

Maria	ha	intervistato	ogni	candidato	possibile
Maria	has	interviewed	every	candidate	possible

‘Maria interviewed every candidate that it was possible for her to interview’ (implicit relative clause reading)

Additional meaning available in this position: ‘Maria interviewed every potential candidate’ (modal)

d.

un	attaccante	buono	non	farebbe	mai	una	cosa	del genere
a	forward	good	not	would-do	never	a	thing	of-the kind

‘a good-hearted forward would never do such a thing’ (intersective)

Additional meaning available in this position: ‘a forward good at playing forward would never do such a thing’ (non-intersective)

e.

gli	edifici	altissimi	di	New York	colpiscono	tutti
the	buildings	very-tall	of	New York	strike	all

‘New York’s buildings, which are very tall compared to the average height of buildings, impress everybody’ (relative)

Additional meaning, available in this position: ‘New York’s buildings, which are very tall objects, impress everybody’ (absolute)

f.

domani	alla	festa	so	che	interverrà	un	attore	famoso
tomorrow	at-the	party	I-know	that	will-intervene	a	actor	famous

‘tomorrow, I know that some famous actor or other will come to the party’ (nonspecific)

Additional meaning, available in this position: ‘tomorrow, I know that a certain famous actor will come to the party’ (specific)

Moving next to English, where the rule is for the vast majority of adjectives to precede the noun, prenominal adjectives are ordered according to the semantic hierarchy first proposed by Sproat & Shih (1991) and subsequently taken up by almost all researchers working in the field of adjectival modification.¹⁵ Ordering restrictions affect both “the relative order of the adjectives” and “the relative distance of an adjective from the modified noun” (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 285): adjectives denoting more subjective properties are farther away from the noun than those denoting objective properties. An instantiation of such a hierarchy is presented in (3), from Alexiadou et al. (2007: 310), of which the English example in (4), from Alexiadou et al. (2007: 310) is a typical illustration.

(3) Quantification/Numeral > Quality/Speaker-oriented > Size > Shape/Color > Provenance/Argument

(4)

the	three	beautiful	big	grey	Persian	cats	that I saw yesterday
D	quantification	quality	size	color	provenance	N	Relative Clause

In English, as in Italian, and Romance more generally, prenominal adjectives are compatible with the interpretations connected with direct modification. For instance, the nominal phrase the visible stars in (5), from Cinque (2010: 6), has the individual-level reading, ‘the stars that are generally visible’.

(5) the visible stars include Aldebaran and Sirius

Similarly, in (6), from Cinque (2010: 7–8), the non-restrictive meaning ‘all his acts were condemned; they are unsuitable’ is available.

(6) all his unsuitable acts were condemned

Example (7) shows a case of modal interpretation (‘every potential candidate’):

(7) Mary interviewed every possible candidate.¹⁶

On the basis of the evidence provided by the ordering and interpretation of linearly prenominal adjectives, several researchers have proposed that direct modification adjectives are merged in “a set of functional projections which are hierarchically structured” (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 311–312) and are originally prenominal. In particular, direct modification adjectives have been assumed to be merged either as specifiers of dedicated functional projections (Cinque 2010), or as syntactic heads (Abney 1987, Delsing 1993, Androutsopoulou 1995, among several others).

Notice that, in English, prenominal adjectives display interesting differences in their interpretation when compared to Romance: “prenominal adjectives, apart from the interpretation typically associated with the prenominal position, also take over the kind of interpretation that in the Romance languages is conveyed only by postnominal adjectives” (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 288). In particular, they are “systematically ambiguous between a reading in which they denote an enduring, or individual-level, property and a reading in which they denote a temporary, or stage-level, one” (Cinque 2010: 6). For instance, the nominal phrase the visible stars in example (5), besides the individual-level interpretation mentioned above (‘the stars that are generally visible’), also has a stage-level interpretation (‘the stars that happen to be visible now’). Similarly, the adjective unsuitable in (6) can be interpreted both as non-restrictive (‘all his acts were condemned; they are unsuitable’) and restrictive (‘all and only his acts that were unsuitable were condemned’). Prenominal adjectives in English are also ambiguous between a modal (‘every potential candidate’ in (7)) and an implicit relative clause reading (‘every candidate that was possible for her to interview’). These ambiguities arise for nearly all types of readings shown in (1) and (2) (see, for detailed examples and further literature, Alexiadou et al. 2007: 289–394, and Cinque 2010: 1–17). Larson (1998, 2000a, 2000b; see also the examples discussed in Cinque 2010: 19–20) has shown that direct and indirect modification adjectives actually can co-occur in prenominal position in English, and that the adjectives interpreted as direct modifiers are always closest to the noun (namely, “the adjectives displaying the interpretive properties of indirect modification precede […] those displaying the properties of direct modification”, Cinque 2010: 57): for instance, in the nominal phrase in they described every (in)visible visible star (Cinque 2010: 57, example 1b), the first adjective in the linear string (‘(in)visible’) can only be interpreted as stage-level (‘the stars which are (in)visible now’), while the second (‘visible’) can be interpreted as individual-level (‘the stars which are usually visible’).

In order to account for these facts, it has been claimed that adjectives interpreted as indirect modifiers originate in a dedicated source that is often referred to as a predicative-like structure (a reduced relative clause according to Kayne 1994, Alexiadou 2001, Alexiadou & Wilder 1998; or a small clause, Demonte 1999). In particular, Cinque (2010) assumes that prenominal indirect modification adjectives in English are merged in a reduced relative clause that is higher than the projections where direct modifiers are merged (for a representation and discussion of the structure he proposes, see Cinque 2010: 63, example 14).

On the other hand, the ambiguities exhibited by postnominal adjectives in Romance have been explained assuming that in those languages the adjectives which appear linearized after the noun have two sources. One is the genuinely prenominal projection where direct modifiers are merged, the other is (probably) a postnominal projection where indirect modifiers are assumed to be merged (these are described in Section 3.3). The pre-/postnominal position on the syntagmatic axis of the adjectives structurally generated in prenominal position has been assumed to be contingent on the movement of the head noun or of the lexical projection Noun Phrase (NP; see Grosu 1988; Valois 1991a, 1991b; Bernstein 1991, 1993; Crisma 1991, 1996; Cinque 1994, 1999, 2005a, 2010; Giusti 1993, 2002; and Longobardi 1994, among others); NP-movement may also be supplemented by remnant movement (Shlonsky 2004 and Laenzlinger 2005, among others). Here, we are agnostic as to the N/NP-movement issue, and broadly refer to movement across prenominally merged adjectives by the term “N/NP-movement”. That is because our point of focus is orthogonal to the specific debate, and the patterns we are interested in can, in principle, be derived under any of the two implementations of nominal movement.

3.2 Direct and indirect modification adjectives in Greek

In Standard Modern Greek, every adjective or adjective type can occur to the left of the noun (“in Greek all adjectives are prenominal”, Alexiadou et al. 2007: 364): the prenominal position is the default position for adnominal adjectives. As in English, prenominal adjectives are usually ordered according to the hierarchy in (3), as shown in (8).¹⁷

(8)

poles	omorfes	megales	aspres	persikes	gates18
many	beautiful	big	white	Persian	cats
quantification	quality	size	color	provenance	N

‘many beautiful big white Persian cats’

As far as their interpretation is concerned, prenominal adjectives, like in English, are ambiguous between the individual-level, non-restrictive, modal, non-intersective, absolute, intensional, and specificity-inducing interpretation typical of direct modification adjectives, and the stage-level, restrictive, manner-denoting, intersective, and extensional interpretation typical of indirect modification adjectives (Alexiadou et al. 2007, Stavrou 2012). For instance, the adjective palia in (9), from Kolliakou (2004), when prenominal, is ambiguous between the intersective (‘in bad condition, ruined’) and the non-intersective reading (‘a building that used to serve as a church in the past’).

(9)

a.

mia	palia	eklisia
an	old	church

1. ‘a church in bad condition’ (ruined, etc.)

2. ‘a former church’

b.

i	palia	eklisia
the	old	church

1. ‘the church in bad condition’ (ruined, etc.)

2. ‘the former church’

Thus, in Standard Modern Greek, prenominal adjectives display the same type of ambiguities seen in English (Section 3.1): they can be interpreted as either indirect or direct modifiers and, when co-occurring, the adjectives interpreted as direct modifiers are always closer to the noun than those displaying the interpretive properties of indirect modifiers (in ta aorata orata asteria, lit. ‘the invisible visible stars’, the first adjective, aorata, can only be interpreted as stage-level—‘the stars which are not visible right now’—while the second adjective, orata, can only be interpreted as individual-level—‘the stars which are normally visible’). Thus, precisely as in English, we assume two distinct merge positions for prenominal modifiers: direct modification adjectives are merged as specifiers of dedicated functional projections higher than the noun, and indirect modification adjectives are merged as reduced relative clauses in a higher position, but lower than NumP: DP > NumP > Reduced RC > AP > NP. No such position is crossed over by the N/NP; thus, both the adjectives generated as direct modifiers and those generated as (prenominal) reduced relative clauses are linearized prenominally.

A difference with respect to English is that, in Standard Modern Greek, many (though not all) adjectives can also appear postnominally. Unlike prenominal ones, postnominal adjectives can only be interpreted restrictively, intersectively and as stage-level predicates (Kolliakou 2004, Campos & Stavrou 2004, Alexiadou et al. 2007, Stavrou 2012). For instance, as shown in (10), from Kolliakou (2004), the adjective palia can only have the intersective interpretation ‘in bad condition’.

(10)

mia	eklisia	palia
a	church	old

1. * ‘a former church’

2. ‘a church in bad condition’ (ruined, etc.)

In definite DP s, postnominal adjectives must be preceded by a definite article which “doubles” the definite article that precedes the noun (11a); definite DP s containing a postnominal (modifying) adjective without an article are ungrammatical, as shown in (11b).

(11)

a.

to	pedi	to	kalo
the	child	the	good

‘the good child’

b.

*	to	pedi		kalo
	the	child		good

The phenomenon in (11a) was called “determiner (or definiteness) spreading” by Androutsopoulou (1995), and the noun phrase where articulated adjectives appear is dubbed “polydefinite”.¹⁹ The phenomenon is typical of everyday, colloquial language; it is not attested in most written, learned, or scientific genres, where the prenominal positioning of adjectives seems to be the rule. Concerning this fact, an anonymous reviewer expresses doubts as to the correctness of our method insofar as we compare a construction that is mostly a feature of oral speech in Standard Greek with the same construction that appears (only) in written texts in Calabria Greek. The objection is quite reasonable, and gives us the opportunity to make two further observations. First of all, the written texts of Calabria Greek explored here are actually transfers of various types of unofficial texts originating in the oral tradition and are, therefore, likely to encode everyday informal language rather than literary styles. Second, the polydefinite construction, although typical of the oral language, is not entirely absent from written usage, and this holds true throughout the history of Greek (Manolessou 2000; Guardiano 2003, 2016), at least ever since a definite article in D(eterminer position) developed: indeed, “the presence of determiners within the noun phrase realizing D is a prerequisite for the presence of the multiple pattern” (Alexiadou 2014: 4). One further remark is that there is one particular subtype of the polydefinite construction, exemplified in (14) below, which is not encountered in typical written styles. This is the order [art Adj art N]. According to Manolessou (2000: 150), this construction is attested since Medieval Greek, but only in non-literary styles (“in more literary verse texts [… it] is either non-existent or rare, while in more popular texts it is much more frequent”, Manolessou 2000: 150). As shown further below, this construction has been analyzed as generated through fronting of the constituent [art+Adj], originally generated postnominally, to the left of D, and such a movement is usually associated with some type of informational markedness (e.g., focus). Thus, it is not surprising that it is absent from written texts (or very rare), where discourse markedness strategies are normally not employed. We say more about this particular order below.

The analyses that have been proposed for polydefiniteness are many and different, and placed within different linguistic persuasions. Here we cannot do justice to all of them—let alone attempt a survey—but we can at least classify them according to what we understand are the major differences in the way(s) they approach the phenomenon. There are those that are launched by and large within the cartographic approach (which echoes Kayne’s 1994 antisymmetric theory), dating back to the 1990s, as depicted in work by Androutsopoulou (1995), and continuing today (cf. Ntelitheos 2003, Panayidou 2013, Velegrakis 2011); within the same framework are found those that favor some type of clausal analysis (Alexiadou & Wilder 1998, Campos & Stavrou 2004, Marinis & Panagiotidis 2011). The latter can be further distinguished according to whether the clause in which the adjective of the polydefinite originates is a kind of reduced relative (ComplementPhrase/IinflectionPhrase (CP/IP), in the spirit of Kayne 1994), or whether it is a kind of small clause (Stavrou 2012) or appositional structure (Lekakou & Szendroi 2012).²⁰ Outside the generative framework, Kolliakou (2004), launched within Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), is a deep and thorough semantic and syntactic analysis of polydefiniteness, and a valuable reference work.

The adjectives in polydefinite DP s can only be interpreted restrictively, intersectively, and as stage-level predicates (Kolliakou 2004, Campos & Stavrou 2004, Alexiadou et al. 2007, Leu 2008, Stavrou 2012, Lekakou & Szendroi 2012, Alexiadou 2014, Lekakou 2017). In (12a), from Kolliakou (2004), for instance, the sentence with the articulated adjective ikani in postnominal position has the meaning ‘only the efficient researchers will be fired’. If the adjective is prenominal and does not have an article, as in (12b), the sentence is ambiguous: it can mean (i) ‘all the researchers, including the efficient ones, will be fired’ (non-restrictive interpretation of the adjective), and (ii) ‘those researchers that are efficient will be fired’, as in (12a), with the adjective interpreted restrictively.

(12)

a.

o	dhiefthindis	dhilose	oti	i	erevnites	i	ikani	tha	apolithun
the	director	declared	that	the	researchers	the	efficient	will	fired

‘the director declared that (only) the efficient researchers will be fired’

b.

o	dhiefthindis	dhilose	oti	i	ikani	erevnites	tha	apolithun
the	director	declared	that	the	efficient	researchers	will	fired

1. ‘the director declared that all the researchers, including the efficient ones, will be fired’

2. ‘the director declared that those researchers that are efficient will be fired’

Example (13), again from (Kolliakou 2004), is identical to (10), with the only difference being that in (13) the DP is definite. As in (10), the adjective palia, in postnominal position, is only interpreted intersectively (‘in bad condition, old building’).

(13)

i	eklisia	i	palia
the	church	the	old

1. * ‘the former church’

2. ‘the church in bad condition’ (ruined, old, etc.)

To sum up, it seems that in Greek all postnominal adjectives can only get the kind of interpretation typical of indirect modification.

There is one more aspect associated with the use of polydefinitetenss and that is the pragmatic impact it has in discourse. As has been shown in detail by Kolliakou (2004; also by Cornilescu 2006 and Cornilescu & Nicolae 2011 for the Romanian [cel+Adj] construction) the postnominal adjective—which is, as mentioned above, emphatic and/or contrastive—serves as a means to pick out a salient property (according to Kolliakou 2004, the unique property) of the referent, thus narrowing down the set of referents which have been previously introduced in the discourse. Concerning these aspects, at least since Anagnostopoulou (1994; see also Tsakali 2008), some parallelism with the interpretation of clitic doubling structures has been pointed out. In particular, it has been suggested that the two share some strict “familiarity” condition (see also Campos & Stavrou 2004). Since the interrelationship between the semantics and the pragmatics of polydefiniteness merits deeper research, here we are simply assuming that the pragmatic impact of the construction is rendered possible because the postnominal adjective, being an intersective modifier, modifies the whole network of meaning components of the noun, which make up its referent, as a complete entity (Bouchard 2002).

As mentioned above, in Standard Modern Greek, polydefinite adjectives can also appear in prenominal (in fact, pre-article) position, to the left of the article that precedes the noun, as shown in (14).

(14)

to	kalo	to	pedi
the	good	the	child

‘the good child’

The order to kalo to pedi (14) has been described as a consequence of a fronting movement of the complex [art+AP] to the left of D—either to SpecDP or to the specifier of a dedicated projection above DP (Horrocks & Stavrou 1987, Stavrou & Horrocks 1989, Campos & Stavrou 2004, Guardiano & Stavrou 2014, Guardiano & Michelioudakis 2019, among others). This movement is triggered by the feature [+contrast] (or [+focus], or both) with which the articulated adjective is endowed. However, as assumed by Campos & Stavrou (2004), the adjective may stay in situ and bear contrastive stress, or move higher. In any case, the fact remains that the adjective in the polydefinite DP receives emphatic pitch accent and is also pragmatically focal because it stands for the new information conveyed by the entire nominal phrase, whereas the denotation of the noun represents old or background knowledge.²¹ As mentioned above, structures like (14) are not found in Ancient Greek (Manolessou 2000, Guardiano 2003).

With all the above being said, an assumption made by several authors (for instance Alexiadou & Wilder 1998; Alexiadou et al. 2007; Stavrou 2012, 2013; Alexiadou 2014) on the basis of the aforementioned evidence is that Standard Modern Greek has originally postnominal adjectives, which are assumed to be generated in a clausal-like structure. Based on that assumption, Stavrou (2012, 2013) argues that the set of interpretations that articulated adjectives receive in polydefinite structures are due to their function as indirect modifiers rather than to the presence of the definite article. If this is on the right track, it follows that in the polydefinite construction the definite article in front of the adjective must be assigned a purely formal role: it can be dubbed the “spurious” article along the lines of den Dikken (2006). In particular, according to Stavrou (2012, 2013), the definite morpheme that accompanies the adjective in the polydefinite DP is attributed to the need of the postnominal adjective to show concord with the noun it modifies and which it linearly follows. Although for clarity we continue to refer to the item that precedes the adjective as “(definite) article”, it is important to realize that we do not really consider that item an article per se but rather a morpheme homophonous to the article which plays a special role in polydefiniteness (realization of definiteness and case), as well as in nominal appositive structures more generally. This line of reasoning is in line with those analyses that assign an expletive (functional) character to the adjectival article in polydefinite DP s (cf. Androutsopoulou 1995), while attributing definiteness to either a postulated DefinitenessPhrase, DefP (Lekakou & Szendroi 2012), or a dedicated Iota Phrase (Kyriakaki 2011); for a more general cross-linguistic perspective concerning the role and function of (different types of) similar morphemes, which appear with noun modifiers in various languages and share several properties with the adjectival article in Greek (i.e., Linkers), see Franco, Manzini & Savoia (2015) and Manzini & Savoia (2018). Our analysis of the structure proposed for Greek polydefiniteness is developed in Section 4.

To sum up the content of the present section, in Standard Modern Greek there seems to be evidence of three distinct separate sources for adjectival modifiers: a prenominal merge position for direct modification adjectives and two distinct positions where indirect modification adjectives are generated, one prenominal, of the type advocated in Cinque (2010) for English, and one postnominal, which is the topic of discussion in Section 4.

3.3 Direct and indirect modification adjectives in Romance

In Romance, as has been shown in (1), prenominal adjectives are unambiguously interpreted as direct modifiers, namely as being modal/subjective, intensional, non-restrictive, and non-intersective, and functioning as individual level predicates. All these interpretations are also available to postnominal adjectives, which, as shown in (2), are ambiguous between the direct modification interpretation and its conceptual opposites (manner denoting, extensional, restrictive, intersective, stage level; cf. Cinque 2010 and Alexiadou et al. 2007 for a summary and the relevant literature). These ambiguities have been explained as follows.

As far as adjectives linearized postnominally but interpreted as direct modifiers are concerned, it has been assumed²² that they merge in prenominal position, and that their postnominal occurrence is a consequence of N/NP-movement. The landing site selected in each language determines which class(es) of such prenominally merged adjectives will appear pre- or postnominally. Romance languages instantiate various possibilities of such raising (Guardiano et al. 2018). Bernstein (1991), for instance, has shown that in Walloon, provenance adjectives cannot be prenominal (15), and has assumed that this depends on the fact that N/NP systematically raises over them.

(15)

a.

one	bèle	bleuve	cote	alemande
a	beautiful	blue	dress	German

‘a beautiful blue German dress’

b. * one bèle bleuve alemande cote

In Italian (and, as a matter of fact, in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and several other Romance languages)²³ the N/NP moves higher: as shown in (16), provenance and (shape/)color adjectives are never found in prenominal position.

(16)

a.

un	grande	vaso	rotondo/rosso	cinese
a	big	vase	rounded/red	Chinese

‘a big rounded/red Chinese vase’

b. * un rotondo/rosso vaso cinese

c. * un cinese vaso

In Romance, some adjectives can occur in both pre- and postnominal position. As a rule, each position is associated with a different set of interpretations or meanings. For instance, in example (17), adapted from Alexiadou et al. (2007: 344–345), prenominal occurrence of povero as in (17a) is associated with the meaning ‘pitiable’ rather than ‘poor, impoverished’, and indeed is compatible with the adjective ricco (‘rich’); on the contrary, its postnominal occurrence in (17b) can only be associated with the meaning ‘poor, impoverished’, and it is therefore incompatible with its opposite, ‘rich’.

(17)

a.

quel	povero	ragazzo	(ricco)	non	ha	amici
that	poor	boy	rich	not	has	friends

‘that poor/pitiable (rich) guy doesn’t have friends’

b.

quel	ragazzo	povero	*	ricco	non	ha	amici
that	boy	poor		rich	not	has	friends

‘that poor/impoverished guy doesn’t have friends’

Similarly, in (18), adapted from Bouchard (2002), the adjective nuova in prenominal position in (18a) has the interpretation ‘one more, an additional’ (the addition of the adjective usata ‘used’ is indeed possible), while in postnominal position the interpretation can only be ‘new’, as shown by the ungrammaticality of the adjective usata ‘used’ in (18b).

(18)

a.

ho	comprato	una	nuova	macchina	(usata)
have	bought	a	new	car	used

‘I bought one more (used) car’

b.

ho	comprato	una	macchina	nuova	*	usata
have	bought	a	new	car		used

‘I bought a (brand) new car’

A further, quite similar, case is provided by example (19), where vecchio in prenominal position, as in (19a), has the meaning ‘we have been friends for a long time’, while in postnominal position it can only have the meaning ‘aged’, as in (19b).

(19)

a.

ho	incontrato	un	vecchio	amico
have	met	a	old	friend

‘I met an old friend’

b.

ho	incontrato	un	amico	vecchio
have	met	a	friend	old

‘I met an old/aged friend’

The adjective sola in (20) shows a further case: in prenominal position as in (20a) it means ‘only one’, while in postnominal position as in (20b) it can also have the meaning ‘alone’.

(20)

a.

è	arrivata	una	sola	ragazza
is	arrived	a	only	girl

‘only one girl has arrived’

b.

è	arrivata	una	ragazza	sola
is	arrived	a	girl	alone/only

‘only one girl has arrived’, ‘A girl has arrived alone’

Example (21) (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 345, example 84, adapted from Bouchard 2002) shows a further instance of an adjective that has two different meanings according to its pre-/postnominal occurrence: the first occurrence of numerose, in prenominal position, is associated with a numeral reading (‘many families’), while the second occurrence, in postnominal position, has a modal reading (‘families with many components’).

(21)

numerose	famiglie	numerose	hanno	protestato
numerous	families	numerous	have	protested

‘many numerous families have protested’

To explain these cases, it has been suggested (see, for instance, Bernstein 1993; Larson 1999; 2000a, 2000b; Crisma 1996, among others) that these adjectives (along with a few others) actually merge in two different (prenominal) positions. For instance, the prenominal occurrence of povero in (17a) is likely to be generated in the projection where speaker-oriented adjectives are merged, while the postnominal povero in (17b) is presumably generated in a position closer to the noun (where adjectives expressing more or less objective properties of N are merged): as such, it has been crossed over by N/NP and therefore it occurs postnominally. Similarly, the first occurrence of numerose in (21) is likely to be generated in a high projection where quantification items are merged, while its second occurrence is likely to be generated in a lower position, closer to N, where qualifying/size adjectives are merged (Alexiadou et al. 2007).

In the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (Guardiano 2014, Guardiano & Stavrou 2014, Guardiano et al. 2016, Guardiano et al. 2018), only a few quantificational and quality-denoting, speaker-oriented adjectives are found in prenominal position as in (22); all the others occur, without exception, in postnominal position as in (23).

(22)

na	bbeḏa	makina	[Siciliano]
a	beautiful	car

‘a beautiful car’

(23)

a.

	na	makina	ranni	bblu	teteska	[Siciliano]
	a	car	big	blue	German

‘a big blue German car’

b. * na ranni makina

c. * na bblu makina

d. * na teteska makina

Notice that, unlike Italian, these dialects disallow multiple prenominal modification; when two (or more) adjectives modify one and the same noun, only one can be prenominal. This suggests that in Southern Italo-Romance only one prenominal position is available for (a few, lexically specified) adjectival modifiers. Similar patterns have been spotted in other Italo-Romance dialects.²⁴

Cross-linguistically, this is not an exceptional case: there are, in fact, languages in which most, if not all, prenominal adjectives occur postnominally as a consequence of N/NP-movement. In Irish, for instance, all adjectives (with few exceptions) only occur in postnominal position: this has been analyzed as a consequence of “N raising around the adjectives to a functional head position in the space between D and N” (McCloskey 2004: 1; cf. also Rouveret 1994 for Welsh). Similarly, in Semitic (see Shlonsky 2004, Cinque 2005b), the postnominal position of adjectives, as well as their mirror-image ordering, has been explained as the consequence of NP-movement combined with roll-up.

In Southern Italo-Romance, the adjectives which occur in prenominal position are also found postnominally. In this case, the differences in their interpretation are very similar to those observed in (17)–(21). To mention one example, in (24) and (25), from Salentino Romance,²⁵ the adjective bwenu (‘good’) in postnominal position, as in (24a, 25a), has the modal meaning ‘good, of good quality, edible’, while in prenominal position, as in (24b, 25b), it can only get the quantificational interpretation, ‘a big quantity of’, an interpretation that is excluded when the adjective is postnominal.

(24)

a.

ogghju	(ku)	mbiu	mjeru	bbwenu	[Salentino]
want.I	that	drink.I	wine	good

‘I want to drink good wine’

b.

ogghju	(ku)	mbiu	bbwenu	mjeru
want.I	that	drink.I	good	wine

‘I want to drink a big quantity of wine’

(25)

a.

a	kkweti	fungi	bbweni
has	picked	mushrooms	good

‘He/she picked good/edible mushrooms’

b.

a	kkweti	bbweni	fungi
has	picked	good	mushrooms

‘He/she picked a big quantity of mushrooms’

To explain the pre- and postnominal occurrence of bbwenu in (24) and (25), one could resort to the same explanation suggested for the meaning alternations observed with povero, nuovo, vecchio, solo, and numeroso in (17), (18), (19), (20), and (21), respectively, namely that the adjective has two prenominal sources: one higher, where it gets the meaning ‘a good quantity of’ and one lower, where it gets the meaning ‘of good quality’.

An adjective that displays alternations in interpretation which seem to be connected to its position is bellu, beddu.²⁶ In Siciliano, the prenominal position can only be associated with the meaning ‘X has everything in order to be an excellent X’. For example, in (26a), bbella/beda²⁷ kassata has the meaning ‘a cassata that has all the properties required to be a good cassata’. In postnominal position, as in (26b), an additional interpretation is possible, namely the one associated with the meaning ‘aesthetically pleasant’. Similar alternations are also shown in (27).

(26)

a.

mi	vwogghju	mancjari	na	bbella	kassata	[Siciliano]
to.me	want.I	eat.I	a	beautiful	cassata

‘I want to eat a well made cassata’

b.

mi	vwogghju	mancjari	na	kassata	bbella
to.me	want.I	eat.I	a	cassata	beautiful

‘I want to eat a beautiful cassata’, ‘I want to eat a well made cassata’

(27)

a.

Gjovanni	s’	akkattau	na	bbella	kasa/makina
Giovanni	to.him	bought	a	beautiful	house/car

‘Giovanni bought a house/car that has everything in order (to be a good house/car)’

b.

Gjovanni	s’	akkattau	na	kasa/makina	bbella
Giovanni	to.him	bought	a	house/car	beautiful

‘Giovanni bought a beautiful house/car’, ‘Giovanni bought a house/car that has everything in order (to be a good house/car)’

Examples (28)–(30) are from Salentino.

(28)

a.

na	bbella	piccinna	[Salentino]
a	beautiful	girl

‘A girl who is well behaved, pleasant, nice to talk with …’

b.

na	piccinna	bbella
a	girl	beautiful

‘A nice girl’

(29)

a.

na	bbella	makina
a	beautiful	car

‘A car that is well equipped, easy to drive, beautiful …’

b.

na	makina	bbella
a	car	beautiful

‘A beautiful car’

(30)

a.

na	bbella	kasa
a	beautiful	house

‘A house that is comfortable, spacious …’

b.

na	kasa	bbella
a	house	beautiful

‘A beautiful house’

Finally, in these dialects the postnominal position is associated with the interpretation of indirect modifiers (which is never available with prenominal adjectives). For instance, the adjective ranni in (31a) is compatible with a restrictive interpretation, and the adjective socjalista in (31b) can be interpreted as non-specificity inducing. Notice that the postnominal position is also compatible with the conceptually opposite meanings, as shown in the translations of the examples in (31), both from Siciliano.

(31)

a.

i	figghi	ranni	ri	Ggjovanni	su	ddittura	[Siciliano]
the	sons	big	of	Giovanni	are	doctors

‘the older sons of Gianni are doctors’ (restrictive)

Additional meaning available in this position: ‘Gianni’s sons, who are aged, are doctors’ (non-restrictive)

b.

rumani	o	komiziu	veni	nu	sinniku	socjalista
tomorrow	at-the	meeting	comes	a	major	socialist

‘tomorrow, some socialist major will intervene at the meeting’ (nonspecific)

Additional meaning, available in this position: ‘tomorrow, a certain socialist major will intervene at the meeting’ (specific)

On the basis of the aforementioned evidence, Guardiano & Stavrou (2014) assume that, as in the rest of Romance, in these dialects adjectives have two sources. The first is the source where direct modifiers are merged: a set of originally prenominal positions which are hierarchically ordered. In Southern Italo-Romance, like in Celtic, such positions are massively crossed over by the N/NP; thus, most direct modification adjectives are found postnominally. Only adjectives with quantitative interpretation (like bwenu in 24 and 25) and speaker-oriented ones (like bellu/bedu in 26–30) are allowed in prenominal position. The second source is the one where indirect modification adjectives linearized postnominally are assumed to be merged (see the discussion about Romance in Section 3.1). This would explain the ambiguities in the interpretation of postnominal adjectives (which are similar to the rest of Romance), the differences in scope associated with different word orders of postnominal adjectives, and the (actually marginal) occurrence of postnominal adjectives after prepositional modifiers.

3.4 The positioning of adjectives in Italiot Greek

As already noted in Guardiano & Stavrou (2014), Italiot Greek exhibits at least two major differences with respect to Standard Modern Greek in the syntax of adjectival modifiers. The first is that there are strong constraints on prenominal adjectives. In Salento Greek, as in Southern Italo-Romance, almost all classes of adjectives are disallowed in prenominal position, as shown in (32).

(32)

a.i.

meletisa	ena	libbro	griko	[Salento Greek]
read.1pst	a	book	Greek

‘I read a Greek book’

a.ii. * meletisa ena griko libbro

b.i.

melètisa	èna	lìbbro	ròdino
read.1pst	a	book	red

‘I read a red book’

b.ii. * meletisa ena rodino libbro

c.i.

meletisa	ena	libbro	cinurio
read.1pst	a	book	new

‘I read a new book’

c.ii. * meletisa ena cinurio libbro

d.i.

meletisa	ena	iìbbro	mea
read.1pst	a	book	big

‘I read a big book’

d.ii. ?? meletisa ena mea libbro

Indeed, there are very few exceptions to this pattern. It appears that only numerals, the modifiers ‘other’ and ‘only’ and the adjective orrio (‘nice’, ‘beautiful’, along with a few other synonyms or antonyms, with strong speaker-oriented interpretation) are accepted in prenominal position (33).²⁸ In fact, in Salento Greek, postnominal modification seems to be the default choice for most adjectives, as in Southern Italo-Romance (and unlike Standard Greek).

(33)

meletisa	ena	orrio	libbro	[Salento Greek]
read.1pst	a	beautiful	book

‘I read a beautiful/interesting book’

On the basis of this evidence, Guardiano & Stavrou (2014) assume that the restrictions observed on prenominal adjectives are triggered by the same rule as Southern Italo-Romance, namely N/NP movement over (almost) all prenominally merged adjectives.

In the written sources of Calabria Greek (34), the number of prenominal adjectives is extremely small (Guardiano & Stavrou 2014): almost all (classes of) adjectives occur systematically in postnominal position.

(34)

a.

ena	provaton	galari	[Calabria Greek—written sources]
a	sheep	dairy

‘a dairy sheep’ [ena galari provaton > unattested]

b.

ena	hhorafi	herco
a	field	fallow

‘a fallow field’ [ena herco hhorafi > unattested]

c.

tin	ffacin	din	aspri
the	lentil	the	white

‘the white lentil’ [tin aspri ffacin > unattested]

d.

mia	frafti	megali
a	hedge	big

‘a big hedge’ [mia megali frafti > unattested]

The adjective maño (with the subject-oriented meaning ‘beautiful’, ‘nice’) is found in prenominal position (35), as are, more marginally, kalo (‘good’) and brutto (‘bad’).

(35)

mu	irte	mia	mañi	micedda
to.me	came	a	beautiful	young.lady

[Calabria Greek—written sources]

‘a beautiful young lady came to me’

Two other adjectives which are found in prenominal position are mavro, as in (36a), and povero, as in (37a) (the latter borrowed from Romance). Notably, both such adjectives exhibit significant differences in their interpretation according to whether they occur prenominally or postnominally; such differences are identical to those observed in Romance (see (17)): in prenominal position they take a strongly speaker-oriented interpretation (‘miserable, pitiable’), while in postnominal position as in (36b) and (37b) they take the interpretation ‘black’ and ‘poor, impoverished’, respectively. These interpretations have been confirmed by the speakers.

(36)

a.

ena	mavro	sciddi	[Calabria Greek—written sources]
a	black	dog

‘a pitiable/miserable dog’

b.

ena	sciddi	mavro
a	dog	black

‘a black dog’

(37)

a.

o	povero	liko
the	poor	wolf

‘the pitiable wolf’

b.

to	lleddendu	tom	bovero
the	brother	the	poor

‘the poor (= who is not rich) brother’

As far as the currently spoken varieties of Calabria Greek are concerned, the speakers provided judgements which are consistent with the distribution we encountered in the texts: provenance, color and shape adjectives are never possible in prenominal position, as shown in (38).

(38)

a.i.

mia	micedda	vutana	[Calabria Greek—spoken]
a	girl	bovese

‘a girl from bova’

a.ii. * mia vutana micedda

b.i.

ena	vivlio	rodino
a	book	red

‘a red book’

b.ii. * ena rodino vivlio

c.i.

mia	gastra	strogghilo
a	vase	rounded

‘a rounded vase’

c.ii. * mia strogghilo gastra

Marginally tolerated in prenominal position are some size- and quality-denoting adjectives. For instance, the adjective megàlo, never found prenominally in the texts, is accepted in prenominal position by some speakers (e.g., ena megalo spiti, lit. ‘a big house’, is possible in parallel with ena spiti megalo). Other adjectives accepted in prenominal position by the speakers though not found prenominally in the texts are cinurio (‘new, young’) and paleo (‘old’), which exhibit the same alternations in meaning between the pre- and postnominal position as seen in Romance (cf. (19)). The prenominal position of kalo (‘good’) and maño (‘beautiful, nice’), largely found in the written sources, is accepted by the speakers as well. Notice also that in DP s with multiple adjectival modifiers no variety of Italiot Greek accepts more than one adjective in prenominal position.²⁹ Finally, notice that, again like (Southern Italo-)Romance and unlike Standard Modern Greek, adjectives which occur prenominally seem not to be compatible with the interpretations typical of indirect modifiers, while those which occur postnominally are ambiguous between the non-restrictive/non-intersective interpretation and the restrictive/intersective one.

The evidence so far suggests the following conclusions:

• In Italiot Greek there is N/NP movement over prenominally merged adjectives. This property sets a major divide between Italiot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, where N/NP movement over adjectives is not possible.

• Indirect modifiers are only postnominal. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that they are merged in the same position where postnominal indirect modifiers are merged in Romance, and presumably in Greek.

An important issue is whether postnominal adjectives in definite DP s generate polydefinite constructions in Italiot Greek; in particular, one problem is how to account for the fact that, unlike Standard Modern Greek, in Italiot Greek postnominal adjectives are (assumed to be) generated from two distinct sources, only one of which would in principle be compatible with polydefiniteness (whose underlying structure is discussed in Section 4).

In Salento Greek, postnominal adjectives are never articulated: no trace of polydefinite constructions is found, as seen in (39). This is the second major difference between Italiot Greek and Standard Greek.

(39)

meletisa	ton	libbro	rodino	[Salento Greek]
read.1pst	the	book	red

‘I read the red book’

Similar evidence is found in the currently spoken varieties of Calabria Greek: speakers tend to dislike polydefinite DP s, and when explicitly asked, they characterize them ‘archaic’ (cf. (40a) vs. (40b)).

(40)

a.

	i	daskoli		cinuri	iendonnusi	tus	daskalu		paleu
	the	teachers		young	imitate	the	teachers		old

[Calabria Greek—spoken]

‘Young professors imitate old teachers’

b.

??	i	daskoli	i	cinuri	iendonnusi	tus	daskalu	tus	paleu
	the	teachers	the	young	imitate	the	teachers	the	old

‘Young professors imitate old teachers’ (archaism)

Yet, as noted in Guardiano & Stavrou (2014), in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek³⁰ postnominal adjectives are systematically articulated in definite argument DP s as in (41).³¹

(41)

a.

ta	cerata	ta	makria	[Calabria Greek—written sources]
the	horns	the	long

‘the long horns’

b.

to	lleddendu	tom	bovero
the	brother	the	poor

‘the poor brother’

As already mentioned, there is at least one important difference between the polydefinite structures attested in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek and those of Standard Modern Greek: no traces of articulated adjectives occurring before the articulated noun, of the type to akrivo to amaksi, very common in Standard Modern Greek (see (14)), have been found. As pointed out earlier, this type of construction is almost absent from Ancient Greek texts (Manolessou 2000, Guardiano 2003).

Finally, it must be noted that instances of polydefinite structures are residually attested in traditional texts of Salento Greek, as well ((42) comes from a folk song), presumably depicting older stages of the language and, therefore, suggesting that the polydefinite pattern existed in the older times also in that variety.

(42)

na	vali	ti	guneddha	ti	kkali	ci	to	mantili	to	matassoto	[Salento Greek—folk song]
that	wear.2sg	the	skirt	the	beautiful	and	the	apron	the	silk

‘to wear the beautiful skirt and the silk apron’

Here, we assume that the presence of polydefinite structures in the older varieties of Italiot Greek is a relic of a system where polydefiniteness was fully productive. If this assumption is correct, one may wonder what may have triggered its loss. In Section 5, we argue that the loss of polydefiniteness is one of the consequences of the adoption of N/NP-movement across prenominal adjectives.

4.1 The basic questions and an overview

The questions that arise with respect to the data presented in the previous section are: (a) how to account for the restrictions on the occurrence of prenominal adjectives in the two Greek varieties of Southern Italy; (b) how to account for the polydefinite patterns observed in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek and how to explain their loss in present day Italiot Greek.

The first question was answered by Guardiano & Stavrou (2014). Their proposal, as already mentioned (Section 3.4), relies on the hypothesis that Italiot Greek adopted N/NP-movement over prenominally merged adjectives, and that this change happened under the pressure of contact with the neighboring Romance dialects. Their hypothesis is that the contact with Romance encouraged the interpretation of postnominal adjectives as ambiguous between the readings connected to direct modification and those connected to indirect modification; that, in turn, triggered the reanalysis of postnominal adjectives as originating prenominally and crossed over by N/NP, a process that had as a consequence the restrictions on prenominal adjectives illustrated above in (32–38).

As far as the second question is concerned, our hypothesis runs as follows: in Standard Modern Greek, postnominal adjectives are indirect modifiers (Stavrou 2012) which, we assume, originate inside a clausal structure. In particular, in the spirit of Campos & Stavrou (2004), we assume a DP-internal predicative structure the head of which encodes the predication relation. This is purported to reflect the fact that, in polydefinite structures, the adjective and the noun are found in a predicative relationship—the noun representing the subject and the adjective representing the predicate—paraphrasable by a copulative clause (to vivlio to kalo, lit. ‘the book the nice’, can be paraphrased as ‘the book is nice’).³² Importantly, the same holds of adjectives following the noun in an indefinite DP. Thus, ena vivlio akrivo (lit. ‘one/a book expensive’) means (ena) vivlio ine akrivo (‘one/a book is expensive’). Of course, an IP, along the lines of Kayne (1994) as implemented for Greek by Alexiadou & Wilder (1998), can also endorse the predicative relation.

The crucial part of this analysis is that the adjective is merged postnominally and it is an indirect modifier. Another very important aspect, mentioned also in Section 3.2 and repeated here for convenience, is that the morpheme that precedes the adjective in polydefinite DP s is the spell-out of definiteness and case, does not have meaning, and does not contribute to the interpretation of the combination noun–adjective (which is simply due to the character of the adjective as indirect modifier): the purpose of the article that precedes the adjective in polydefinite DP s is, therefore, solely grammatical or morphological.

4.2 Polydefiniteness and nominal apposition

To describe the grammatical requirements that motivate the need for the article in front of the adjective in polydefinite structures, we adopt the analysis proposed by Campos & Stavrou (2011, 2012) for nominal apposition in Greek³³ and in Spanish: (43) illustrates the Greek counterpart of the so-called ‘N-of-N Construction’ in English (e.g., that angel of a mother of his).³⁴

(43)

	o	agelos	i	mitera	tu
	the	angel	the	mother	his
[DP	D	[PredP [NP agelos]	Pred	[[+N] mitera	tu	]]]

In appositive structures of the type shown in (43), two nouns in juxtaposition are involved, which always share the same case (assigned to the DP by an external case assigner). This case-sameness between the two nouns, a defining feature of nominal apposition in general, has replaced the older genitive (in the same constructions).³⁵ It is further the equivalent of the prepositional genitive³⁶ that occurs in, e.g., Italian (quell’angelo di sua madre, lit. ‘that angel of his mother’) or Spanish (el idiota del vecino, lit. ‘the idiot of.the neighbor’; see Villalba 2007) and of the inflected genitive visible in Latin (monstrum mulieris, lit. ‘monster woman.gen’, Plaut. Poen. 273). Di, de, and English of are case assigners in the DP: they assign case to the predicate. No such case assigner is available in Standard Modern Greek.³⁷ Its role has somehow been replaced by the identity of case between subject and predicate.

The other distinctive feature of appositive structures of the type exemplified in (43) is the obligatory “definiteness agreement” between the two nouns in apposition (i.e., both nouns must be preceded by a “definite article”). Campos & Stavrou’s analysis of nominal appositions crucially assumes that the feature that is spelled out as the definite article, which they label [+def], is found not only in D, but also in the head Pred of the PredP in (43),³⁸ and is spelled out as the same morpheme, although this is not semantically the article. This happens because: (i) Pred is a nominal head and as such it has nominal features, including [+def] (because it belongs to the extended DP);³⁹ (ii) the definite article is the default realization of the feature [+def]. By that we mean that whenever D is [+def] there is a definite article in the noun phrase (see also Kyriakaki 2011). What is important to note here is that [+def] does not encode semantic definiteness; indeed, it is spelled out as the definite article not only with definite nouns, but also with proper names and generic nouns. This means that the feature [+def] is a morphosyntactic feature rather than a semantic one, and that each and every realization of the definite article is the spell out of [+def]. Semantic definiteness, instead, has been assumed to be due to the presence of other categories in the nominal phrase. For instance, Kyriakaki (2011) argues that semantic definiteness is related to an Iota Phrase and/or a Familiarity Phrase. A similar proposal is also made by Lekakou & Szendroi (2012), who treat the definite article as semantically expletive and locate semantic definiteness in a different functional head inside the nominal phrase, namely, DefP.

One important similarity between nominal appositives and polydefinites is that they both encode definiteness and morphological case agreement. Thus, in order to capture the nature of polydefinites, transferring to them the analysis for appositives proposed by Campos & Stavrou seems to be a natural step forward.⁴⁰ We therefore propose that adjectives in polydefinites originate as predicates in the complement of Pred. The noun (or NP), on the other hand, is in the specifier of PredP. A simplified version of the proposed structure is given in (44).

We assume that the adjectival article is the spell-out of Pred, just like in appositives according to Campos & Stavrou. The crucial part of this analysis⁴¹ is that the feature [+def] is again carried by both D and Pred. Pred, by virtue of being a nominal head, carries all the relevant nominal features (gender and number, case, and definite/indefinite). The unvalued [+def] feature on Pred is valued (as probe) by the [+def] feature on D, and it is spelled out as the morpheme identified as the definite article (default realization) in both cases. It is in this way that “double” definiteness (or definiteness spread) can be accounted for: Pred agrees with D in definiteness (along with case, gender, and number), and they are realized in exactly the same way.

In Standard Modern Greek, within a single noun phrase, nouns and modifying adjectives show concord⁴² in phi-features and case. In the light of this robust rule, we make the following hypothesis: if the adjective is merged prenominally, concord is effected straightforwardly, given the Spec-Head configuration adjective and noun are found in (Cinque 2010; Giusti 2008, 2009, 2011; see also Koopman 2006). If the adjective is merged postnominally (as we assume is the case with adjectives in the polydefinite construction) this kind of concord is not available. Therefore, some mediator is required. The Pred head takes up precisely that function: it mediates concord in “definiteness”, phi-features, and case between noun (subject) and adjective (predicate). More specifically, the head of PredP shows concord with the NP at its specifier and the NP shows concord with the adjective via predication. In the final spell-out of (44), to amaksi to akrivo, noun and adjective concord in definiteness, case, and phi-features.⁴³ In Standard Modern Greek, this concord has overt morphological exponence. The morphological realization of case, indeed, is a prominent feature of Standard Modern Greek: as a rule, within a DP, the noun and its adjectival modifier(s) bear overt case morphology. This overt concord is sometimes blurred by some syncretism in the declensional system: as we see in Section 5, this is a crucial point where Standard Modern Greek differs from Italiot Greek, where syncretism is much more advanced.

Concerning the morphological realization of case, an important part of the proposed analysis of polydefiniteness as a structure essentially similar to apposition is the assumption that, in Standard Modern Greek, the lexicalization of the [+def] feature has the further effect of realizing morphological case on Pred. In other words, [+def] and case are inextricable; this means that wherever there is a morpheme that spells out [+def] there will also be (morphological) case. We conjecture at this point that the very reason why the functional head Pred takes up the form of the definite article is the fact that the degree of syncretism is less on the article than on any other nominal category (noun, adjective, quantifier), in the sense that there are more case distinctions visible on the definite article than on other nominal heads. To give a concrete example, feminine nouns have syncretized the affixes for the nominative and the accusative case in the two numbers: agapi (‘love’) can be either nominative or accusative; the two cases can be formally distinguished only if the definite article is present, since it has two different forms for the two cases in question: i agapi (‘the.nom love’) is nominative, tin agapi (‘the.acc love’) can be only accusative. That is exactly the root of the phenomenon of definiteness and case agreement in appositive structures, and more generally in Greek.

To sum up, from the assumption that postnominal adjectives in Standard Greek (in both definite and indefinite structures) are merged as indirect modifiers, it can be deduced that the presence of the definite article on postnominal adjectives in the Greek polydefinite construction has a purely formal role: it is just the spell-out of a functional head (Pred) which makes the adjective concord with the noun in definiteness, case, and phi-features.⁴⁴

The question that naturally arises at this point is whether Romance is subject to the same analysis. Leaving aside postnominal adjectives that are crossed over by the noun (or the NP), postnominal adjectives that are indirect modifiers can in principle be analyzed as predicates. Our hypothesis is that genuinely postnominal adjectives in Romance can also be part of some type of predicative clause/reduced relative structure.⁴⁵ However, the predicative head is not lexicalized systematically. It is lexicalized in Romanian and in Aromanian (Campos 2012 and references therein) as the pseudo-article cel in the former and as the suffixed article -l(u) in the latter (see also Campos & Stavrou 2004). In contrast, in Western Romance, it is not lexicalized as a rule with adjectival modifiers (most likely because the feature [+def] is not by default lexicalized as in Greek)⁴⁶ but is actually visible in some selected constructions: for instance, in French (Kayne 2004), postnominal superlative adjectives must obligatorily have a second determiner when occurring in postnominal position (la fille la plus grande, lit. ‘the girl the most big’). So, whether the predicative head is spelled out or not seems to be subject to gradable parametric choices, which probably also depend on the type of predicative head itself (and its position in the DP), on whether [+def] is lexicalized by default, and also (possibly) whether a language has case morphemes and morphological case agreement, and whether morphological case is realized on the definite article.

An interesting discussion of these phenomena in a broader crosslinguistic perspective, with particular reference to Albanian varieties, Aromanian, and Romanian, is proposed in Manzini & Savoia (2018, Part II), with reference to the so-called ‘Linkers’, a label that covers, in their description, several types of constructions involving different types of adnominal modifiers, including “Linkers, Greek article, Iranian ezafe, etc” (Manzini & Savoia 2018: 127). They propose that “in Aromanian and Albanian Linkers are Ds” and connect their distribution to “the minimalist rule of Agree”. Their analysis goes actually beyond the purposes of the present investigation, and, although there are commonalities between our conception of D and Pred and their Linkers, the two approaches differ in many respects, most crucially in the dissociation of Linkers from copulas. Yet, there are several interesting aspects which might combine with our discussion of polydefiniteness in a broader crosslinguistic picture.

What is crucial for the purposes of the discussion in the next section is that, as far as Greek is concerned, there is a strong correlation between the spell-out of the Pred head, definiteness and (morphological) case.⁴⁷