An LFG approach to Modern Greek Relative Clauses

This thesis presents an account of the properties of Relative Clauses in Modern Greek, with particular focus on the distribution of the resumption and gap relativization strategies. For the most part relative clauses have been regarded in the literature as a type of Long Distance dependencies with unique properties.This thesis looks at the properties of three types of relative clauses in Modern Greek (restrictive, non-restrictive and free relative clauses). Working in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar, we present an overview of the most important properties of Modern Greek Relative Clauses focusing on the distribution of the gap and resumption strategies in these constructions. We propose an analysis of Relative Clauses that brings forward the similarities of the three types of Relatives while at the same time manages to account for their dissimilarities, and it is shown that such constructions can be accommodated in LFG quite straightforwardly. The thesis also presents a computational implementation of the analysis using XLE (Xerox Linguistics Environment) a platform for testing and writing LFG grammars.