UCLA

This thesis explores the syntactic and semantic properties of complement pseudo-relatives in Greek, and proposes a new analysis that further refines the structure that has been proposed for them in Cinque (1992). A crucial part of the argumentation relies on the distribution of the complementizer pu, which occurs in restrictive relative, complement factive and pseudo-relative clauses. More concretely, I argue based on the distribution of pu that we can unify the three constructions in which it occurs by making use of a unique syntactic configuration namely, a relative clause (à la Kayne 1994): pu occurs (i) in headed restrictive relative clauses where it is selected by a D-head which can be overt (ii) in factive clauses which are analyzed as relatives where the D-head that selects pu is null and, which get a factive interpretation because they contain a null noun FACT and (iii) in pseudo-relatives which are treated as restrictive relative clauses with an eventive interpretation due to a null event noun denoting a scene that occurs in them. I motivate all the subparts of the structure proposed for complement pseudo-relatives and I further show that it is more precise than previous analyses (cf. Cinque 1992) in accounting for their distributional and interpretational properties.