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The history of deaf education worldwide has mainly focused on the oral versus sign language debate. Only minor attention has been paid to the historical context and background in which educational ideas and methods for teaching deaf children developed. Significant historical information about deaf education in Greece and in Cyprus began relatively late with the founding of the first schools for the deaf in the twentieth century. This paper will provide a comparative examination of the history of deaf education in Greece and in Cyprus by highlighting the most important events that have contributed to the development of the education of deaf people in both countries. Data for this paper were drawn from "official" sources (written documents), as well as from interviews with informants (teachers, parents, and deaf people) of Greece and Cyprus. The study has revealed that the history of deaf education in both countries has been eventful, and it has developed through major shortcomings and debates. Despite the fact that Greece and Cyprus are in close geographical proximity and the fact that their educational policies on various issues are quite similar, the main findings of this study show that a number of factors have led to the development of different provisions for deaf children in these two countries. Specifically, parents' lobbying, Deaf Community empowerment, various legal measures, available technology, and teachers' training backgrounds seem to be the major contributing factors for the establishment of a) bilingual education, and special units and schools for the deaf in Greece and b) oral education and inclusion in Cyprus.

Children in Greece are exposed to a unique literary situation as they live in a monolingual society which uses two different alphabetical systems: the Greek alphabet and the Roman alphabet. Since the school curriculum of preschool education does not include the teaching of Greek or non-Greek letters, environmental print is mainly responsible for primitive hypotheses about letters. In this research 504 preschoolers were tested regarding their ability to differentiate between the two alphabets which circulate widely in the Greek urban print environment. It was showed that preschoolers, although unable to read, were able to differentiate between texts written with Greek or Roman letters. This gives strong evidence for the conclusion that, apart from the major role that visual language plays in the reading of environmental print, information about actual letters is also absorbed by preschoolers.

In this paper we propose an LFG/XLE treatment of Exhaustive Object Control (EOC) constructions in Greek na clauses. We draw on data retrieved from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC) in order to define the verbs that allow EOC. We treat EOC using anaphoric control. We take the subject of the subordinate na clause (controllee) to be a PRO marked with nominative case that is anaphorically related to the object of the matrix clause (controller). We implement this analysis in our LFG/XLE Grammar by adding the new feature ANAPH_C_BY.

In Modern Greek there is a rich aspectual system, which involves both morphologically expressed grammatical aspect and eventuality types, carried primarily by the meaning of the verbal predicate. Particular emphasis is paid to the interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types, since it is due to this interaction that the verbal predicate acquires distinct meanings. In order to explain potential changes in the meaning of the eventualities caused by the interaction with grammatical aspect, I propose a formal analysis within HPSG, using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) for the semantic representations. Following the MRS architecture, I introduce a number of relations, which represent both grammatical aspect and eventuality types. The close interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types triggers special meanings which traditionally can be explained by inserting contextual information into the representations. In this paper, I argue against such an analysis, providing an alternative which is based on the introduction of subeventual templates formulated by Michaelis (2003) and Pustejovsky (1995). In this context, grammatical aspect combines with eventuality types and selects eventualities or subeventualities appropriate to its selection restrictions, using information that is already there in the denotation of the eventualities.

The aim of this paper is to provide a semantic account of valence alternations in Modern Greek of the following general form: (1) NPk V NPi [P NPj] —> NPk V NPj [P NPi] In other words, the valence alternations in Modern Greek we focus on in this paper are the ones involving direct internal arguments (i.e., objects) and indirect prepositional complements. Such alternation patterns in Modern Greek characterize mainly the behaviour of verbal predicates which participate in the so-called Locative Alternation phenomena.