Nominalization and ellipsis in the Greek DP

Two DP-internal phenomena in Greek are being distinguished: nominal subdeletion and substantivization. We show that the two cannot be analyzed as instances of the same phenomenon, and that a unified account in terms of ellipsis is untenable. Instead, nominal subdeletion is analyzed as a genuine case of nominal ellipsis, and substantivization as nominalization in the sense of Chierchia (1998). Two novel results can be drawn as consequence of our analysis. First, the question of whether the omitted constituent in subdeletion is of zero (lexical) or phrasal category can be dispensed with, as it is simultaneously both (just a lexical N(oun) or N with a merged A(djective)). Second, the 'expletive' definite determiner which appears in generic DPs is not at all expletive but contentful: it is the locus of the nominalization operator.