Against distributed deletion

Abstract This paper examines a previously unnoticed ‘split’ construction in Greek, where a possessor that originates in a PP occurs together with the P separated from the possessum. I show a correlation between the availability of this split and the interpretation of a PP. This finding poses a challenge to PF-based accounts of splitting, particularly those that assume distributed deletion (e.g., Fanselow and Ćavar 2002; Fanselow and Féry 2006, Bondarenko and Davis 2023, Murphy and Wilson 2025 i.a.). Such accounts require additional mechanisms beyond those independently required by a syntactic account and fail to predict the distribution of split constructions. Instead, I propose a purely syntactic analysis that accounts for splits in Greek based on a correlation between the interpretation of a PP and its merge height (e.g., Cinque 1999, Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 2007, Schweikert 2005). These findings together with additional theoretical considerations will be shown to provide strong support for the elimination of distributed deletion as a mechanism in natural language.