Adjective-Noun combinations in the Greek of Italy. Polydefiniteness revisited

This study investigates patterns of adjectival modification in the two Greek dialects spoken in Grecìa Salentina (Salento, henceforth GR) and Bovesìa (Southern Calabria, henceforth BO). We compare these dialects with some of the Romance dialects spoken in Southern Italy, i.e. Sicilian (SI), Southern Calabrese (SC), Salentino (SA) and Northern Calabrese (NC), along with (standard) Modern Greek (MG) and (standard) Italian (IT). Both GR and BO display strong constraints on prenominal adjectives, like the neighboring Romance dialects and unlike MG (where all adjectives can be placed prenominally). Postnominal adjectives, on the other hand, are part of a more complicated picture: while in BO (textual tradition) postnominal adjectives are articulated in definite DPs, like in MG, in GR they are never articulated, like in Romance. One of the main targets of this study is re-consider the so-called polydefinite construction in MG (to pedi to kalo/to kalo to pedi, 'the child the good/the good the child'), whereby both the noun and the adjective are accompanied by the definite article. In particular, we try to detect whether the construction found in BO has all the interpretative effects that it has been claimed to have in MG.