One of the core challenges in linguistics is elucidating compounds—their formation as well as the reasons their structure varies between languages. This book on Modern Greek rises to the challenge with a meticulous treatment of its diverse, intricate compounds, a study as grounded in theory as it is rich in data. Enhancing our knowledge of compounding and word-formation in general, its exceptional scope is a worthy model for linguists, particularly morphologists, and offers insights for students of syntax, phonology, dialectology and typology, among others. The author examines first-tier themes such as the order and relations of constituents, headedness, exocentricity, and theta-role saturation. She shows how Modern Greek compounding relates to derivation and inflection, and charts the boundaries between compounds and phrases. Exploring dialectically variant compounds, and identifying historical changes, the analysis extends to similarly formed compounds in wholly unrelated languages.

This book provides a study of the diachronic development of compounds with a verbal first constituent in Ancient Greek. Based on an unprecedentedly comprehensive corpus of such compounds, it offers detailed treatments of their origins, structure and place within the Greek compound system, as well as in-depth and up-to-date introductions to Greek compounds and to linguistic research on compounding.

This collection of papers on phrasal compounding is part of a bigger project whose aims are twofold: First, it seeks to broaden the typological perspective by providing data for as many different languages as possible to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon itself. Second, based on these data which clearly show interaction between syntax and morphology it aims to discuss theoretical models which deal with this kind of interaction in different ways. Models like Generative Grammar, assume components of grammar and a clear-cut distinction between the lexicon (often including morphology) and grammar. Other models like construction grammar do not assume such components and are rather based on a lexicon including constructs. A comparison of these models on the basis of this phenomenon on the morphology-syntax interface makes it possible to assess their descriptive and explanatory power.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified, ranging from languages rich in compounds, such as German, Saami, Estonian and Finnish, to languages poor in compounds, such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech, like Russian, Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers, supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition, allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

This volume bridges contemporary morphological theory with the less-studied aspects of language interference and contact-induced variation and change, and will serve to increase the reader’s understanding of how languages of divergent typologies can affect each other. On the one hand, it shows that the study of dialects offers new challenges to contact morphology, and, on the other, it argues that morphological theory may provide accurate and interesting tools for the analysis of dialectal data. In addition, it proves that dialectal contact-morphology can be profitable for historical linguistics and typology, since it may shed light on language change and structures. The book brings together researchers working on morphology, language contact, and Modern Greek dialects, namely those that have been heavily affected by typologically divergent and sometimes genetically different languages, that is, by the Indo-European and semi-fusional Romance languages and by the Altaic and agglutinative Turkish. Emphasis is placed on a number of issues which are of major importance to contact morphology, such as the role and interplay of language-internal and language-external factors in linguistic change, the borrowing of word-structure and functional categories, the source and use of integrating elements, reduplication, multiple exponence, and case and gender assignment.

Asymmetry in Grammar: Syntax and Semantics brings to fore the centrality of asymmetry in DP, VP and CP. A finer grained articulation of the DP is proposed, and further functional projections for restrictive relatives, as well as a refined analyses of case identification and presumptive pronouns. The papers on VP discuss further asymmetries among arguments, and between arguments and adjuncts. Double-object constructions, specificational copula sentences, secondary predicates, and the scope properties of adjuncts are discussed in this perspective. The papers on CP propose a further articulation of the phrasal projection, justifications for Remnant IP movement, and an analysis of variation in clause structure asymmetries. The papers in semantics support the hypothesis that interpretation is a function of configurational asymmetry. The type/token information difference is further argued to correspond to the partition between the upper and lower level of the phrase. It is also proposed that Point of View Roles are not primitives of the pragmatic component, but are head-dependent categories. Configurationality is further argued to be required to distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive Topic. Compositionality is proposed to explain cross-linguistic variations in the selectional behavior of typologically different languages. The papers in syntax include contributions from Antonia Androutsopoulou and Manuel Español-Echevarría, Dana Isac, Edit Jakab, Cedric Boeckx, Julie Anne Legate, Maria Cristina Cuervo, Jacqueline Guéron, Niina Zhang, Thomas Ernst, Manuela Ambar, Jean-Yves Pollock, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Ilena Paul and Stanca Somesfalean. The papers on semantics include contributions of Greg Carlson,Peggy Speas and Carol Tenny, Chungmin Lee, and James Pustejovsky.

Using different theoretical approaches and frameworks, this book addresses a broad range of themes in contrastive linguistics, including inflection, derivation and compounding, tense, wh-questions, post-verbal subjects, focus and clitics, among others. Comparing English, German, Greek, Romance, Slavic and South Pacific languages, the book highlights the significance of the contrastive perspective for language-specific description and general interface issues, casting light on contrasts between languages at the levels of morphology and syntax. In this respect, it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of language typology and language universals.