Proleptic constructions in Modern Greek

Abstract

We investigate the semantics of an attitudinal construction in Modern Greek, where an attitude verb may take an accusative object followed by a CP (e.g. ‘Maria wants Yanis.ACCi[CP 'proi' only love her]’). Drawing on literature (Kotzoglou 2002; Kotzoglou and Papangeli2007; Kotzoglou 2017) arguing that the accusative object is base-generated in the matrix clause, we propose that this is an instance of prolepsis. Importantly, unlike proleptic constructionsdescribed in other languages, the proleptic object can have 'de dicto' readings, despite being base-generated in the matrix clause. We propose an analysis in terms of semantic lowering, along the lines of Dawson and Deal (2019), arguing that semantic lowering is not restricted to extensional, but can also apply to intensional types of pronouns. Finally, we describe an additional semantic restriction on the proleptic object, as well as the implications of the ModernGreek case for the broader function of prolepsis and the syntax-semantics interface.