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Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 29
2
Little v as a categorizing verbal head:
evidence from Greek
PHOEVOS PANAGIOTIDIS, VASSILIOS SPYROPOULOS,
AND ANTHI REVITHIADOU
. The problem with v
A great body of literature advocates the existence of a verbal categorizing head v, an
assumption that is particularly popular in syntactic decomposition approaches to
categorization, such as Marantz (, a, ) and Harley (a,b, ,
).
1
However, in the work concentrating on Phase Theory (Chomsky et seq.)
v essentially stands for Kratzer’s() Voice, i.e., a causative-transitive or passive head,
which hosts the external argument and, when transitive, may assign accusative case.
Building on Pylkkänen (), Doron (), Alexiadou and Schäfer (), Harley
(, this volume), Anagnostopoulou and Samioti (), and elsewhere, we take the
position that these two heads should be kept distinct. Furthermore, we provide direct
morphophonological evidence in support of the existence of the verbalizing head v as a
separate category, as well as of its systematic realization in Greek.
This is a most welcome step as—with the exception of languages where verbs are
customarily expressed as complex predicates—there is very little explicit morpho-
logical evidence for little v as a verbalizing head. In most cases, only causative
morphology and derivational suffixes forming denominal or de-adjectival verbs are
discussed as the exponents of v (see, for instance, Franchetto on Kuikuro;
Koontz-Garboden b on Ulwa; Gerdts and Marlett ; Mathieu , ;
Embick a on English -en; Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou on Greek
1
See also Harley and Noyer (), Embick (, , a,b, ), Alexiadou (), Folli et al.
(), Arad (, ), Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (), Folli and Harley (, , ),
Borer (a,b, ), Alexiadou et al. (), Embick and Marantz (), Basilico (), Lowenstamm
(), Ramchand (, this volume), Volpe (), Panagiotidis (, , ), Harley (, ,
this volume).
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 31/10/2016, SPi
The Verbal Domain. First edition. Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco, and Ángel J. Gallego (eds).
This chapter © Phoevos Panagiotidis, Vassilios Spyropoulos, and Anthi Revithiadou .
First published by Oxford University Press.