Modern Greek Tense in Main and na Subordinated Clauses: an LFG/XLE Treatment

Representation of grammatical tense and mood was among the serious questions we had to face in our effort to develop a corpus-inspired grammar of Modern Greek (data retrieved from the HNC (http://hnc.ilsp.gr/)). Existing analyses of tense and the subjunctive mood in Modern Greek (Philippaki-Warburton et al. 1984, Holton et al. 1997) do not cover the entirety of tenses available in this language, do not provide a unified analysis of the tense system and the subjunctive mood and do not encode facts of sequence of tenses in subordinated clauses.

Drawing on Reichenbach (1947), we implemented a novel analysis of the MG verbal tense system that models tense usage in main clauses and na- subordinated ones. Our analysis accommodates all the verb forms/tenses that support a main declarative clause in Modern Greek and were attested in our corpus data. Furthermore, our analysis accommodates the manifestations of the subjunctive mood in na subordinated clauses and the sequence of tenses phenomena that can be observed in this type of subordination. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis that provides a unified representation for the tense and mood system and can support a computational grammar of Modern Greek.