On the “Pleonastic” Usage of Complement Markers in Early Modern Greek

A syntactic feature that characterizes Early Modern Greek is the “pleonastic” usage of the complement conjunction oti or pos with the mood (“subjunctive”) particle na , as well as the co-presence of the complementisers oti and pos . These co-occurrences are ungrammatical in Modern Greek, while in vernacular Late Medieval and Early Modern Greek texts they are sufficiently attested. In this paper we record a large number of instantiations of the { oti / pos } + na / oti + pos structures in order to trace the conditions of their occurrence; the examples come from extended prose texts of the 16th century as Kartanos’ “Palaia te kai nea Diathiki” (Kakoulidi-Panou 2000) or Morezinos’ “Klini Solomontos” (Kakoulidi-Panou et al. 2007), as well as an anthology of demotic prose texts of 16th century edited by Kakoulidi-Panou, Karantzola & Tiktopoulou (in press).