Flavours of Mbu in Cypriot Greek

1 (E)mbu in Cypriot Greek This paper starts out from the discussion of the different syntactic approaches to the formation of wh-questions in Cypriot Greek which involve the use of embu and the possible assumptions that have been made for the analysis of mbu, an element that may appear having as a host the wh-phrase inda. It explores the observation that the dialectal wh-phrase inda (mbu) can have four possible allomorphs, which appear to be the result of language change and as a result, present their own morphosyntactic properties, which differ from the aforementioned inda (mbu). The possibility of language change in these whphrases has been the immediate observation of a questionnaire, examining the syntactic restrictions among the allomorphs in four different age groups. The final section of this paper proceeds to show how these four allomorphs are different from the standard form by taking into account any phonological and morphosyntactic properties and by exploring different syntactic analyses for the standard form and its apparent allomorphs. Cypriot-Greek speakers have the optionality of using the element embu in whquestions introduced with wh-arguments (both subjects and objects), wh-quasiarguments and true adjuncts: