The Hellenistic Greek articular infinitive: description and structure

The internal structure of mixed projections is a widely discussed and controversial topic in the syntactic literature (see Alexiadou 2010a, 2010b for overview, and Alexiadou 2001; Borsley and Kornfilt 2000; Bresnan 1997; Panagiotidis 2015 for different approaches). By presenting the results of Paparounas (2017), this talk attempts to contribute to the field a discussion of the Hellenistic Greek articular infinitive, a nominalized construction that has received limited attention in the literature (but see Joseph 1983: 49-51; Pappas 2004: 64; Horrocks 2010: 94-96). After providing a description of the articular infinitive based on data from the New Testament, this talk will attempt to account for its internal structure. The Hellenistic Greek facts provide support for a number of syntactic configurations required in the representation of mixed projections. Articular infinitives appear in adjunct position with various types of Case marking requiring the presence of post-syntactically elided P heads, while the ability of defective T to license accusative Case is necessary to account for the Accusativus cum Infinitivo construction. In addition, dedicated functional nominalizers (as motivated by Panagiotidis 2015: 134-172) are argued to be necessary to capture the differences between Hellenistic Greek and overt- nominalizer languages like Turkish, and to account for the mixed categorial behaviour of nominalizations in general. Finally, based on Ackema and Neeleman’s (2004: 172-181) observation that the phonological exponence of nominalizers correlates with head directionality cross-linguistically, the lack of exponence for Hellenistic Greek nominalizing heads suggests that Hellenistic Greek is a VO language, as argued independently by Kirk (2012) and Michelioudakis and Angelopoulos (2013). This discussion of the Hellenistic Greek articular infinitive thus illustrates how the study of nominalizations might shed light not just on the structure of mixed projections, but on more general properties of grammars as well, head directionality being a case in point.