Copying, and Order-changing Transformations in Modern Greek
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Date
1970-05
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Ohio State University. Department of Linguistics
Abstract
The phenomenon of "redoublement de complement" in Modern Greek may straightforwardly be re-interpreted as copying: that is, in terms of a rule-series that copies the complement on to the front of the Verb-Phrase, pronominalizes one or other of the two occurrences, and then either treats the pronominalized occurrence as an enclitic or deletes it. But evidence may be adduced that, at least for Greek, a similar copying process is also involved in the transformations for Relativisation, Subject-raising, and Conjunct-movement, as well as in the derivation of inputs for backward Gapping. It is suggested that the difference between the English and Greek outputs results not from the fact that English employs "order-change" where Greek employs "copy" processes: rather, the processes of Copy are common, but English obligatorily deletes the relics of copy, while Greek sometimes retains them. Copying is thus to be considered an important (and universal?) mechanism of order-changing.
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Working Papers in Linguistics, no. 4 (1970), 1-30.