SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The present thesis aims to describe some aspects of Mod Greek syntax.It contains an introduction and five chapters. The introduction states the purpose for writing this thesis and points out the fact that it is a data-oriented rather than a theory-oriented work. Chapter one deals with the word order in Mod Greek. The main conclusion drawn from this chapter is that, given the relatively rich system of inflexions of Mod Greek,there is a freedom of word order in this language an attempt is made to account for this phenomenon in terms of the thematic structure of the sentence and PSP theory. The second chapter examines the clitics; special attention is paid to clitic objects and some problems concerning their syntactic relations .to the rest of the sentence are pointed out; the chapter ends with the tentative suggestion that clitics might be taken care of by the morphological component of the grammar. Chapter three deals with complementation; this a vast area of study and for this reason the analysis is confined to 'oti', 'na' and'pu' complement clauses; Object Raising, Verb Raising and Extraposition are also discussed in this chapter. The fourth chapter takes up Relative Clauses but again the analysis is confined to the two main relativizers that is, to 'o opios' and 'pu'. It is suggested that for 'pu' a complementizer analysis is quite possible.The second part of the chapter discusses Relative Extraposition which is explained in terms of thematic structure and FSP theory. Chapter five is about Coordination in Mod Greek.An attempt is made to distinguish between ' sentential" and 'phrasal' in terms of 'processes'.Gapping is also examined and pragmatic considerations are taken into account for its analysis. The thesis ends with a section which contains all the relevant bibliography.