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The Landscape of Greek Quantifiers

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Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 90))

Abstract

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Greek this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chapter 1. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Greek, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the examples, I use common transcription practice, and do not follow the orthographical conventions. I do designate stress, though, in words with more than one syllable, to increase readability.

  2. 2.

    This is one of the reasons, Giannakidou and Merchant argue, why indefinite object drop is a phenomenon distinct from VP ellipsis or null arguments in Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese.

  3. 3.

    Giannakidou (1997, 1998) claims that the ká-indefinite also has a positive polarity use (like some: I didn’t see some student), but the facts are not so clear, because speakers do accept the ká-indefinite inside the scope of local negation, or non-local negation. The category of positive polarity indefinites is illusive (see Giannakidou and Yoon to appear), and even in English, there may be two incarnations of some, the positive polarity one being distinguished as more emphatic, as suggested in Giannakidou and Yoon to appear. For more on intonation, quantifiers, and scope, see Section 6.6.

  4. 4.

    I think it is also worth noting that Greek has the so called Genus species topicalization:

    (i)

    Kréas,

    mu

    arési

    móno

    to

    xirinó.

     

    Meat,

    me.gen

    like.3sg

    only

    the.nom

    pork.nom

     

    As for meat, I only like (the) pork.

    		  
  5. 5.

    Notice that non-quantity denoting weak quantifiers, are not easily compatible with D:

    (i)

    I

    {polí/ líji/ *kápjii} fitites

    pu irthan sto parti,

    ekanan poli fasaria.

     

    [The

    [many/few/*some students]]

    that came to the party

    made a lot of noise.

    Weak Qs as a class, then, do not generally embed under D. I am not going to address the contrasts here, but I think it suggests that non-quantity weak Qs introduce ∃ (inherently, or via existential closure), thus preventing combination with a definite D.

  6. 6.

    Non-constituency is also suggested by the fact that we can have agreement mismatch between the arguments. Notice below the feminine gender on perisoteres, which is recycled for the ellipsis on the second clause which is masculine:

    (i)

    Perisoteres

    jinekes

    irthan

    apoti

    andres.

    		 
     

    more.fem.pl.

    women.fem.pl

    came

    than

    men.masc

    		 
     

    More women came than men.

    		    
  7. 7.

    Veloudis (1982) and Giannakidou (1997, 1998), in their studies of negation, identify four negative morphemes in Greek: dhen/mi(n), for sentential negation (mentioned in Section 6.1.1), but also lexical negation mi as in mi-simetoxí ‘non-participation’, and oxi which is used as constituent negation, metalinguistic negation, and external negation as in Oxi, dhen írthe o Jánis ‘No, John didn’t come’.

  8. 8.

    Giannakidou (1998, 2001) mentions a so-called ‘indiscriminative’ (after Horn 2000) use of DCI with negation, in cases such as:

    (i)

    Dhe milise

    me (enan)

    opjondhipote—milise me ton proedro!

     

    not talked.3sg

    with a

    FCI.person—talked.3sg with the president

     

    She didn’t talk with just anybody—she talked with the president!

    Such uses of FCIs are common crosslinguistically, and usually are marked, e.g. with just in English, and the indefinite article in Greek.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ed Keenan for inviting me to write this paper. This project is much needed, and I am honored to be able to contribute with my piece on Greek quantifiers. Greek is a language with such long documented history – but it is quite remarkable how little of it is known in formal semantic discussions of quantification. I hope this paper will fill the gap, and inspire more curiousity about the Greek data. Many thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewer, as well as to Ed Keenan and Denis Paperno for their comments, suggestions, and overall editorial assistance. In the course of writing, I benefited a lot from discussions with Melita Stavrou, Despoina Papadopoulou, and Josep Quer. Many thanks, finally, to Katerina Chatzopoulou, Tasos Papakonstantinou, and Melita Stavrou for judgements and discussion of the data.

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  1. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Anastasia Giannakidou

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  1. Anastasia Giannakidou
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Correspondence to Anastasia Giannakidou .

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  1. , Dept. of Linguistics, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue 405, Los Angeles, 90095-1543, California, USA

    Edward L. Keenan

  2. , Dept. of Linguistics, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue 405, Los Angeles, 90095-1543, California, USA

    Denis Paperno

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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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Giannakidou, A. (2012). The Landscape of Greek Quantifiers. In: Keenan, E., Paperno, D. (eds) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 90. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2681-9_6

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