Dative Clitics and Case Licensing in Standard and Macedonian Greek

In this paper, I will address the question of Case absorption from a somewhat different angle: rather than focus on the conditions that must be met in order to allow a clitic to co-occur with a full NP, I will examine constructions that require a clitic (sometimes allowing, but at others prohibiting a doubled NP). I will argue that the existence of such constructions demonstrates that clitics can participate in Case assignment. In answer to the question of why the clitics are obligatory, I will argue that although Modern Greek NPs lack the morphological dative of Ancient Greek, Greek verbs continue to assign dative to their oblique complements; thus oblique NPs can only receive Case through the “mediation” of a clitic or a (light) preposition, which assign genitive or accusative instead of dative. Clitic doubling has semantic consequences that have been studied at some length (e.g., see Anagnostopoulou (1993), Uriagereka (1995)). Here, however, I will focus exclusively on the syntactic conditions involved.