Nominal Constructions in Modern Greek: Implications for the Architecture of Grammar (review)

This book is a head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) account of the syntactic, semantic, and contextual constraints associated with Greek nominal structures. Kolliakou explores issues associated with definites and genitives using data from the distribution of Greek noun phrases.

The book is divided into seven chapters, including an introductory section that presents a synopsis of the issues that are explored in detail in subsequent sections. Ch. 2 presents empirical evidence that aims to support the assumption that nominal structures are, at least partly, unified. The evidence includes the manifestation of phi-features on all prenominal modifiers in Greek, the distribution of bare singular determiners, and the ‘floating’ nature of the nominal possessive clitic. Subsequent sections offer an HPSG account of the syntax and semantics of determiners, numerals, and adjectives. K puts forward a new definition that treats the category of determiners as functional-nominal heads in contrast to the lexical-nominal heads, nouns and adjectives. The term ‘nominal’ indicates that all of these heads will carry case and agreement features.

Ch. 3 is dedicated to the exploration of the syntactic properties of the weak-form pronominal genitive. K adopts an approach that treats weak possessive clitics as pronominal affixes and presents a number of arguments against a postlexical clitic approach. She provides an analysis based on the notion of ‘complement composition’, a notion parallel to ‘argument composition’ that has been independently proposed in the literature. The focus of Ch. 4 is on the single and multiple occurrences of the definite determiner in nominal structures, the ‘monadic definites’ and ‘polydefinites’ as they are termed in the text. K extends the affixal approach presented in Ch. 3 to account for the distribution of the definite determiner in both constructions. She also proposes a semantic unification of the two structures through a quantificational approach. Ch. 5 deals with Greek genitive structures. K presents a detailed literature review on the issue and indicates a number of problems with previous accounts that are based on the thematic hierarchy hypothesis. The latter does not seem to be able to explain the split nature of genitives in Greek. In place of this, she proposes the ‘nominal denotation hypothesis’ which restricts the number of genitives dependent on a given head noun to two. These two genitives must be of distinct ‘denotation’ types, that is, one ‘individual-denoting’ phrase and one ‘property-denoting’ phrase. This system seems to account in a more satisfactory way for the distribution of genitives in Greek and especially for the wide range of asymmetries that are observed in this distribution. These asymmetries are presented in detail in Ch. 6 where it is shown that the related phenomena can be explained only if both syntactic and semantic information is integrated in the grammar.

The final chapter summarizes the issues discussed in the preceding chapters and provides an HPSG account of the syntax and semantics of the individual-denoting and property-denoting phrases. The former are given argument status; that is, they are assumed to be subcategorized complements of heads. The latter, by contrast, are considered ‘functors’ in that they select for lexical heads as their arguments.

Nominal constructions in Modern Greek is a valuable source of information on the internal structure and the semantics of the Greek noun phrase. It deals with long-standing problems on the distribution of noun-phrase-internal elements in an original way, supporting its proposed analyses with empirical arguments drawn from a wide range of data. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in the syntax and semantics of the Greek noun phrase or in HPSG. It is also of value for researchers who are pursuing a better understanding of the properties of the nominal domain in general.