Inda mbu, nambu or ine ti pu? Acquiring complex structures in Cypriot Greek
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2010/03/0036/000156Keywords:
acquisition, diglossia, clefts, wh-questionsAbstract
The current study investigates the hypothesis that certain Cypriot Greek (CG) wh-phrases show similar paths of acquisition with cleft sentences based on syntactic complexity. That is, wh-phrases of the inda (mbu)-type in CG can be decomposed in an abstract way as clefts, giving ine ti pu ‘what is it that’. Targeting a comparison between these two structures, wh-questions with inda (mbu) along with subject- and object-clefts were included in a production elicitation experiment given to children aged 2;7-6;4. The preliminary results raise several issues ranging from syntactic complexities and movement difficulties in the two structures to sociolinguistic factors and implications for the possible diglossic situation in the Greek Cypriot community.
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Papadopoulou, E. (in progress). Acquisition of wh-questions: Evidence from Cypriot Greek. Doctoral dissertation, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Pavlou, N. 2010. MBU! On wh-objects and true adjuncts of Cypriot Greek. In: Ralli, A., Joseph, B.D., Janse, M., & Karasimos, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory Conference, 155-178. Patras: University of Patras Department of Philology, Linguistics Division.
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Copyright (c) 2010 Natalia Pavlou (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
