On the “pleonastic” usage of complement markers in Early Modern Greek

What is it about?

A syntactic feature that characterizes Early Modern Greek is the "pleonastic" usage of the complement conjunction óti or pos with the modal/mood ("subjunctive") particle na, as well as the co-presence of the complementisers óti and pos. These co-occurrences are ungrammatical in Modern Greek, while in vernacular Late Medieval and Early Modern Greek texts they are sufficiently attested. In this paper we record a large number of instantiations of the {óti / pos} + na / óti + pos structures in order to trace the conditions of their occurrence; the examples come from extended prose texts of the 16th century as Kartanos' “Palaia te kai nea Diathiki” or Morezinos' “Klini Solomontos”, as well as an “Anthology” of demotic prose texts of 16th century edited by Kakoulidi-Panou, Karantzola & Tiktopoulou (in press)

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