Expanding of the left

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the particle ande in Greek as a discourse element that expresses the speaker's attitude towards the utterance, building on work on its Romanian counterpart hai/haide. The background assumption is that ande anchors the utterance to the speech event. It is shown that it can modify an imperative, a subjunctive, a pu-clause, or an adverbial/PP expression. Assuming that there is a Speech Act layer in the uppermost part of the left periphery, it is shown that ande realizes a predicative position in that layer. The different readings it gives rise to are derived on the basis of the utterance it embeds. Since there is no event structure in that layer, the elements that realize the Speech Act position are 'defective' in both inflectional and thematic terms.

Keywords

• left periphery
• speech acts
• discourse
• particles
• predicative