Descontinuidade de Sintagmas Nominais no Grego Antigo: uma abordagem minimalista

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that Ancient Greek displays great variability in the number of grammatical word orders of its sentences and constituents. Even more intriguing is the fact that this scrambling of the linear order also frequently separates the elements that form a constituent, stranding them in discontinuous segments. These discontinuous constituents present a problem for analyses couched on traditional gerativism, since they challenge its base syntactical assumptions. This doctoral dissertation, however, seeks to analyze the discontinuity phenomenon through a syntactic analysis based on the Minimalist Program (CHOMSKY, 2000). It is shown that the phenomenon can be adequately described by Nunes’ (1995) copy-theory of movement. such that discontinuity arises as an effect of the scattered deletion of the elements that form a constituent, where elements of a constituent are variously pronounced in high and low copies. We propose that two phonological restrictions, independently formulated for modern languages, motivate the occurrence of scattered deletion in Ancient Greek. These restrictions, we propose, occasionally came into conflict with one another, barring continuous constituents, in specific contexts, from converging in Phonological Form, requiring, as a result, the application of scattered deletion to rescue the derivation.