Adjective-noun combination in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy. Polydefiniteness revisited

This study investigates aspects of adjectival modification in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy. All the dialects examined (Greek and Romance) display strong constraints on prenominal adjectives. In the Romance dialects, such constraints are stronger than in Italian: actually, the phenomenon sets apart Southern Italy from the rest of the Romance-speaking world. As for Italiot Greek, prenominal adjectives obey restrictions that do not exist in (Standard) Greek (where all types of adjectives are allowed in prenominal position): this sets a crucial syntactic distinction between the two. As far as postnominal adjectives are concerned, in Romance all adjectives can be postnominal, with no constraints operating on them, and Southern Italy is coherent with this picture. In Greek, instead, the picture is more complicated: in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek, postnominal adjectives are articulated in definite DPs, like in Modern Greek, while in Salento Greek and in currently spoken Calabria Greek they are never articulated, like in Romance. The paper explores all such patterns, with particular attention to postnominal modification.