Embedded Root Phenomena in Modern Greek: Exploring the Distribution of Modern Greek Left Dislocation

This paper provides a descriptive account of the distribution of three types of Modern Greek Left Dislocation in complement clauses introduced by different predicates. In particular, we show that Left Dislocation in Modern Greek displays three patterns of embedded distribution: (i) Contrastive Left Dislocation displays the characteristic distribution of Embedded Root Phenomena (ERP; Emonds 1970), insofar as it is only acceptable in a subset of complement clauses, (ii) Clitic Left Dislocation is acceptable in all complement clauses, and (iii) Hanging Topic Left Dislocation is unacceptable in all complement clauses. To account for the Modern Greek data, we develop a syntactic analysis based on the Intervention account of ERP (Haegeman 2012). However, we acknowledge that the three-way contrast in the embedded distribution of the various types of Modern Greek Left Dislocation necessitates certain additions to the Intervention account for which there is no independent motivation. Thus, further investigation of our proposal, as well as alternative approaches on the matter, is still necessary.