Acquiring the Possessive Construction in Modern Greek

The acquisition of the Possessive Construction is one of the main topics of interest within the acquisition of the DP. There are three main reasons for this: a) the Possessive Construction emerges very early in child speech, b) in many languages it involves movement, and thus it can provide evidence for the availability of movement operations, and c) it requires morphological marking both in languages with rich morphology, like Modern Greek (MG), and in languages with poor morphology, like English. It can, thus, provide insights not only into the acquisition of syntax, but also into the acquisition of morphology. The acquisition of the DP in MG has been the topic of several studies during recent years. The present paper aims to explore one aspect of the acquisition of the DP, the acquisition of the Possessive Construction. The goal is twofold: 1) to describe the acquisition sequence of the Possessive Construction in MG and 2) to come to some general conclusions about the availability of Aand A'Movement in early child speech, as well as the availability of structures which involve the Left Periphery of the DP. The second goal will be achieved through the comparison of the acquisition of the Possessive Construction in MG with the acquisition of the Possessive Construction in two typologically distinct languages, German and Hebrew. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 deals with current analyses of the Possessive Construction in MG and the predictions for the acquisition sequence of the MG Possessive Construction deriving from each one of them. These predictions are evaluated in Section 3 through acquisition data. In Section 4, the data on the acquisition of the Possessive Construction in MG are compared with data on the acquisition of the Possessive Construction in two typologically distinct languages, German and Hebrew. The results of this study are then summarized and discussed in Section 5 within a broader context, the acquisition of the Left Periphery of the nominal domain.