Exceptional clitic placement in Cypriot Greek: Results from an met study

Abstract

Recent studies on the pattern of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek (Revithiadou 2006; Chatzikyriakidis 2010, 2012; Pappas 2010, 2011), have posited the existence of counterexamples to the rule that the pronoun is proclitic after a complementizer or other such function words. These counterexamples are associated with a specific set of lexical items: ε′vτε, óτi, ετεiδn′, αφov′, and γiατ. Equally unclear is the clitic pattern with preverbal elements such as focused dp subjects. I present here the results of an acceptability judgment study of 34 Cypriot speakers based on magnitude estimation tests (MET) in ten different syntactic environments and two different conditions (enclisis vs. proclisis), for a total number of data points n = 680. The results demonstrate that these exceptional patterns are integral parts of Cypriot Greek competence and highlight the role that lexical items can play in terms of creating sub-patterns of generalizations within larger schemes.