Resultative Constructions in English and Romanian

Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2017

The aim of this paper is to analyze the class of Romanian nominalizations which enter light verb constructions with the light verbs a face 'make, do' and a avea 'have'. We show that such nominalizations are not event, but result. In order to test this hypothesis, we have chosen two of the most productive suffixes which appear with these nominalizations in light verb constructions, namely -ţie and -re. As will be seen, the two suffixes may attach to the same verb stems, giving rise to doublets (e.g. from a afirma 'state': afirmaţie vs. afirmare). The syntactic analysis of these doublets proves that -re is specialized for event readings, while –ţie generally gives rise to result nominals. Returning to light verb constructions, when a verb has both -ție and –re nominalizations available, the light verb will always select the result deverbal noun, the one ending in -ţie, while its -re counterpart will have an event reading and thus will be banned from the light v...

This paper discusses the various methodological and theoretical prerequisites necessary to cope with a seemingly quite simple task. This task consists in establishing the number and types of verb pairs in Lithuanian and Polish which are morphologically related by the presence vs. absence of the reflexive marker and which, from a semantic point of view, relate to each other like converses (= RM-converses). We are faced with the question of whether RM-converses can really be considered a class in a taxonomy of RM-derivatives, sufficiently distinct, primarily, from anticausatives. After delimiting (RM-)converses from symmetrical and reciprocal predicates as well as from the grammatical passive, it turns out that any sensible proposal for a differentiation between RM-converses and anticausatives hinges on the status of the obliquely marked constituent: if it is treated as an argument of the RM-derivative, it has to be counted as a converse to the non-RM-verb since numerical valence is retained; if the oblique constituent counts as an adjunct, the RM-derivatives should be considered an anticausative. The question thus boils down to "taking cuts" on an argument -adjunct cline. Since no existing theoretical account of the morphology-semantics interface provides clear-cut criteria for making decisions that can be generalized, criteria are detailed on a language-specific basis and applied to Lithuanian and Polish two-place RM-converses, for which lexical groups are established. Contrasts between both languages are highlighted on the basis of an in-depth analysis. With all methodological caveats in mind, one of the results of an investigation thus conducted consists in a commented list of RM-converses which, for Lithuanian, comprises three times as many items as were established in earlier investigations of RM-verbs. Apart from this, and the methodological pitfalls brought to light, the article discusses various specific effects relevant for a lexical typology of minor classes of RM-verbs.

Diacronia

This paper aims at demonstrating the explanatory advantages of the old hypothesis concerning the origins of the auxiliary of the Romanian analytic conditional (aș + infinitive) as deriving from the imperfect tense form of the verb (a) vrea ‘(to) want’ < *volere (< VELLE). The grammaticalization process, reconstructed through the comparison with the other Romance languages and by relating it to typical directions of the linguistic change, presupposes intermediary semantic phases (the future-in-the-past value, the hypothetical value which is mostly counter-factual), whose traces may be found in the first Romanian (translated) texts, but which have been generally considered a consequence of the simple loan translation from the language source. The uses of the conditional with a reduced auxiliary (aș, ai, etc. + infinitive) are related to those (co-occurring in the old texts) of the conditional with a recognisable auxiliary (vrea ‘wanted’ + infinitive), for which the value specifi...

Diachronica. International Journal for Historical Linguistics

Introduction Syntactic structures are complex objects, whose subtle properties have been highlighted and elucidated by half a century of formal syntactic studies, building on a much older tradition. Structures are interesting objects of their own, both in their internal constitution and in their interactions with various grammatical principles and processes. The cartography of syntactic structures is the line of research which addresses this topic: it is the attempt to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations. Broadly construed in this way, cartography is not an approach or a hypothesis: it is a research topic asking the question: what are the right structural maps for natural language syntax? Answers may differ, and very different maps may be, and have been, proposed, but the question as such inevitably arises as a legitimate and central question for syntactic theory. If it is a virtual truism that cartography can be construed as a topic and not as a framework, it is also the case that cartographic studies have often adopted certain methodological and heuristic guidelines, and also certain substantive hypotheses on the nature of syntactic structures, which form a coherent body of assumptions and a rather well-defined research direction; we will try to illustrate some ideas and results of this direction in the present chapter. If structures have, in a sense, always been central in generative grammar, the idea of focusing on structural maps arose around the early nineties, following a track parallel to and interacting with the Minimalist Program. Perhaps the main triggering factor was the explosion of functional heads identified and implied in syntactic analyses in the first ten years of the Principles and Parameters framework. One critical step was the full-fledged extension of X-bar theory to the functional elements of the clause (Chomsky 1986) as a CP-IP-VP structure; and the observation that other configurations, e.g. nominal expressions, were amenable to a hierarchical structure with a lexical projection embedded within a functional structure (such as Abney's DP hypothesis, Abney 1987). These advances provided a natural format for the study of the structure of phrases and clauses as hierarchical sequences of the same building block, the fundamental X-bar schema (or, later, elementary applications of Merge); the lowest occurrence of the building block typically is the projection of a lexical category, e.g. a noun or a verb, and this element is typically completed by a series of

Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2020

Professor Ștefan Oltean is celebrating his 70th birthday this July. This special anniversary has occasioned this Festschrift, which we dedicate to him as we were both privileged to have him as our university professor, mentor and scientific advisor of our doctoral dissertations, an experience that has had a long-lasting influence on our careers. The contributors to this volume-colleagues, friends, former and present PhD students-have gathered to celebrate this special occasion. Professor Oltean has promoted current trends in linguistic research such as linguistic generativism, formal semantics and possible world semantics, linguistic pragmatics and linguistic poetics, as well as comparative linguistics, the approaches of which he applied to the analysis of linguistic and discourse phenomena. In formal semantics, possible world semantics and generative grammar, his dedication and enthusiasm have been reflected in both his internationally acknowledged research contributions and the pivotal role he played in introducing these two subjects to the community of philology students and professors in Cluj-Napoca. He is a prestigious member of the research community in these areas of linguistic investigation, where his research contributions as well as his support and guidance to younger members engendered his wide and welldeserved reputation both in Romania and abroad. It is not an understatement that, taking advantage of the unique experience he gained as a visiting professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, he founded and maintained a real school of modern linguistics in the capital of Transylvania. His linguistic interests cover a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on free indirect discourse, narrative discourse, truth in fiction, the semantics of proper names and fictional names, the semantics of questions and exclamations, and multilingualism. Many of his publications feature the concepts of text and literary style; he has worked on the semantics of adjectives and referential expressions, and he has also made important contributions to the semantics of embedded declarative clauses. All these explain the choice of our title, The science of linguistics, which,

2014

English phrasal verbs or German verbs with separable particles constitute good examples of a marked tendency in Germanic languages towards both the use of analytic devices directly attached to the verb and the distribution of content. These constructions, which contrast sharply with what we can find in Spanish or in any other Romanic language, are certainly not isolated within Germanic grammatical structures. On the contrary, they are framed within a constructional philosophy that fosters the direct attachment of constituents to one head, without linking or indirect devices, and should therefore be considered as part of a wider class that could be named ‘direct constructions’. Both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ constructional tendencies, followed by Germanic and Latin-derived languages, respectively, ultimately stem from the way Indo-European specifying adverbs were grammaticalised in each family. The present paper aims to briefly describe the main features and exponents of these Germanic...

This paper discusses resultatives, often considered a subgroup of secondary predicates. Resultatives with an adjectival form (i. e., resultatives that can be considered a special form of secondary predicates) occur only rarely in Croatian. This paper highlights the formal and semantic characteristics of these constructions, as well as other possibilities of expressing resultative meaning. Key words: resultatives, secondary predicates, depictives, adverbials, adverbial resultatives, resultative meaning of prefixes

In this paper I investigate adjectival resultative constructions, which usually do not occur in Romance languages, and adverbial resultative constructions, which are also possible in Romance languages. I claim that adjectival resultative constructions and adverbial resultative constructions rely on different cognitive processes. In particular, I contend that adjectival resultative constructions involve the activation of Langacker's billiard-ball model. Such an analysis turns out to be more satisfactory than formal ones. On the other hand, adverbial resultative constructions, as well as more generally adverbial depictive constructions, are argued to involve the process of property ascription by the conceptualiser and the reference point ability. Finally, I show that adverbial (resultative) constructions exhibit similarities with so-called raising constructions in that both crucially rely on the reference point ability.

Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the …, 2005

The present article deals with clause-initial syntactic reduplications involving verbs, adjectives and nouns in Hungarian. Structurally, they appear to be cases of left-dislocation of a copy of a predicate, their function being contrastive topicalization. After outlining the scope of the phenomenon of reduplication in the system of the present-day Hungarian language, we turn to the so-called contrastive topicalization reduplication construction (CTR) in Hungarian and demonstrate that there are several subtypes of this construction, all of which lend themselves to concessive interpretation. In explaining how concessivity arises, we start from their categorizing function. We argue that what all these constructions of variable size and form have in common is dynamic, online categorization, i.e. they set up mental spaces that either narrow or widen a category, placing the events, properties and participants in the centre of the category, or at its very periphery (within a category, or even outside the category). This cluster of Hungarian constructions is also contrasted with similar reduplication phenomena on the syntactic-lexical continuum in a number of languages,