Deriving the Past Tense augment

Verbal morphology in the Greek past tense morphology involves the prefix e-, traditionally known as past tense augment, which is often taken to depend on stress placement and the prosody-morphology interface. As recently argued in Spyropoulos & Revithiadou (2009), this augment is a segmentally empty prefix with lexically encoded stress, realized after fission or when another formative does not satisfy the T[+PAST] node. This paper presents new data from Cypriot Greek simple verb forms and verbal complexes showing that the existing view of the augment as a stress exponent does not apply in this variety of Greek. The data from this non-standard variety of Greek contribute to a better understanding of the past tense augment by re-defining a morphological analysis that explains the phenomenon in Cypriot Greek.