The Greek dialects in Southern Italy. Effects of language contact on nominal syntax.

Background. According to some recent analyses (Guardiano 2006, Alexiadou, Haegeman, Stavrou 2007) of the Greek Determiner Phrase, adnominal adjectives are unexceptionally prenominal, despite some apparent evidence to the contrary ((a) postnominal adjectives in definite DPs with their own definite article and (b) unarticulated postnominal adjectives in indefinite DPs). It has been shown that articulated adjectives, constituting the phenomenon called polydefiniteness or determiner spread (to pedi to kalo), and also postnominal adjectives in indefinite DPs have a number of properties setting them apart from ordinary modification of nouns by prenominal adjectives ((to) kalo pedi) (Alexiadou&Wilder 1998, Kolliakou 2004, Campos&Stavrou 2004). One more relevant claim is that the so-called polydefinite construction corresponds to postnominal adjectives in Italian primarily in terms of interpretation (Alexiadou et al 2007).Topic. Against this background, the present study aims at investigating this particular subdomain in the two minority varieties of Greek spoken in Salento (henceforth Grico) and in Southern Calabria (henceforth Bovese). Both varieties show certain peculiarities in the syntax of adjectives that, once compared to that of other Romance dialects spoken in the same area, suggest non-trivial phenomena of contact-induced change.