Partitives, pseudopartitives and the preposition apo in Greek

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the main properties of the partitive (PC) and the pseudopartitive construction (PPC) in Greek placing our focus on the distribution of the preposition apo ‘of/from’, which introduces the partitive complement in the PC but is absent from the PPC. We propose two distinct analyses for the two constructions, which predict the particular distribution of apo as a meaningful preposition, according to our hypothesis. We further discuss the crosslinguistic implications of our analysis.