Seržant Ilja. Morphosyntactic properties of the partitive genitive in the subject position in Ancient Greek

Indogermanische Forschungen. — 2012. — Vol. 117. — 187-204 p.Abstract: A surprising property of the Ancient Greek bare partitive genitive NP in the subject position is that it behaves morphosyntactically in many ways as a nominative-marked NP: (i) while being in the logical subject position, it triggers semantically driven verbal agreement and, (ii), it may be coordinated with nominatives. This is striking, since obliques typically do not have access to agreement in ancient Indo-European languages including Ancient Greek. To account for this discrepancy, I assume a covert head of the partitive genitive that is filled by pro with an arbitrary reference (proarb) by default; else, this position can be filled by any quantifier or determiner. It is this proarb that gets Case and triggers verbal agreement. The presence of the proarb in Ancient Greek explains also why the “independent” partitive genitive is not restricted to structural positions only (as are partitives, e. g., in Finnic languages) but can occur at any position including non-argumental adverbials.
Keywords: partitive, non-canonical subject, verbal agreement, Indo-European, case