Romanian nominal inflection: a realizational approach

This paper aims at examining the domain of case theory with respect to the alternation of inflectional and prepositional case marking in the Romanian morpho-syntactic system. It will be shown that Romanian has an intermediate position on the synthetic-analytic scale, in that the genitive and dative cases are marked both (a) inflectionally and (b) syntactically (cf. GOR, 2013). In this respect, this paper addresses issues concerning the synthetic and analytic marking of the dative. We will show that in standard Romanian, the inflectional dative is replaced by a prepositional construction (la+ ACC) under specific conditions-that is, when the first component of the DP cannot host the specific dative case-marker. On the other hand, in non-standard Romanian the P construction la+ ACC appears very often even under no morphological constraints.

The claim of the paper is that in contrast with other Romance languages, but in the same vein with languages like Hebrew and Arabic (Danon 2010: 149), and, possibly, Albanian and Scandinavian varieties which possess an enclitic definite article (Julien 2005, Dobrovie-Sorin and Giurgea 2006), Romanian has grammaticalized a morphosyntactic definiteness feature. The aim of this presentation is to examine the consequences of this fact from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, by investigating several relevant phenomena: the distribution of the two definite articles of Romanian; the historical evolution of the suffixal definite article, and the emergence of the freestanding definite article (a well-known fact being that Romanian has two definite articles), the various double definite structures of Romanian, present both in the old language and in the modern one.

Knowledge Horizons Economics, 2013

Most English loans are nouns and their morphological adaptation is achieved in the sense required by the inflected organization of Romanian language; In some cases, the adopted forms of assimilation also depend on the peculiarities of the grammatical structure of the language of origin. The classification and assimilation of English nouns by Romanian raise issues concerning gender and number categories. Lack of gender differences in the flexion is the characteristic that makes the classification of English in Romanian rather difficult.

First Conference of the Slavic Linguistics Society, 2006

The theory of Paradigm Linkage distinguishes between content and form in inflectional morphology in terms of content-paradigm (i.e. syntactic paradigm of a lexeme) and form-paradigm (i.e. morphological paradigm of that lexeme's root), the default rule of paradigm linkage mapping one-to-one each cell of the lexeme's contentparadigm with its respective cell in the root's form-paradigm. The first type of case this paper discusses overrides the default and associates a single content-paradigm with more than one form-paradigm. Competing form-paradigms are defined in terms of combinations of morphosyntactic properties and seen as depending on markedness. In the second type of instance under scrutiny, a given marked morphosyntactic property causes reduction of the content-paradigm (i.e. two distinct sets of morphosyntactic properties merge into one). Moreover, if in the morphosyntactic property set of a lexeme, properties that give rise to competing formparadigms co-occur with a property requiring reduction of the content-paradigm, both competition and reduction happen. Bulgarian verb morphology thus evidences that marked content should be expected to violate the one-toone mapping of content-paradigm and form-paradigm in inflection.

1998

After briefly presenting the distribution of the Romanian genitival agreeing particle al and the most important results of the previous research, I compare three recent analyses of al that are based on the idea that al is essentially a genitive marker and make use of a K (Case) projection: (I) al is a complex of functional heads (K-P+Agr) in the extended projection of the possessee; (II) al is a K head that forms a constituent with the genitive DP; (III) al is an Agr morpheme projected at PF by a genitival K head that forms a constituent with the genitive. I first compare analysis (I) with analyses (II)-(III) and conclude that analysis (I), although it offers a straightforward explanation for agreement, is contradicted by some distributional facts which indicate that al and the genitive form a constituent. Moreover, it needs an important modification in order to account for the fact that al-genitives can appear outside DPs, in predicative position. Analyses (II) and (III), in which al forms a constituent with the genitive, do not have these empirical problems, but require some modifications of the current minimalist assumptions about structural case in order to deal with the alternation between al and prepositional genitives. I then compare analyses (II) and (III) and I conclude that (II) is preferable because it can account for the loss of agreement of al in some varieties of Romanian.

1997

This paper deals with three phenomena specific to old Romanian: prehead complements to adjectives (i.e., head-final adjectival structures), postadjectival degree markers, and discontinuous adjectival and degree phrases. Following recent work by Adam Ledgeway, we defend the hypothesis that the old Romanian adjectival phrase preserves relics of the head-final and non-configurational syntax of Latin. The fact that prehead complements of adjectives and postadjectival degree markers represent a genuine instance of head-finality (i.e., roll-up movement) is reinforced by the existence of discontinuous adjectival phrases (the hallmark of non-configurationality), discontinuous structures being unavailable in harmonic head-initial systems (Ledgeway, in press).

2008

the audience of the CSSP 2007, the reviewers, and the editors of this volume for useful suggestions and comments on the content of this paper. We are also grateful to Bridget Copley and Cristina Ionicȃ for proofreading the final version. All remaining errors are ours. The research of the first author in alphabetical order was supported by a DFG grant to the project B1, The formation and interpretation of derived nominals, as part of the Collaborative Research Center 732, Incremental Specification in Context, at the University of Stuttgart. 1 The data in (2) are taken from . Note that the two examples do not form a minimal pair, since the theme is a bare plural in (2a) and a singular definite in (2b). Although this may have implications for the grammaticality contrast, we do not attempt to address this matter here.

Revue roumaine de linguistique, 2020

By studying the grammaticalization of Romanian auxiliaries from a diachronic Romanian and a comparative Romance perspective, this paper argues that the output of grammaticalization is a predictable pattern in a given language, i.e. a language-specific parametric choice. Specifically, in the passage from old to modern Romanian we observe that a number of emergent periphrastic structures (innovations in contrast to Latin) died out, against the well-known transition from syntheticity to analyticity in the development of the Romance languages (i.e. the profusion of auxiliary structures in this particular situation). In order to account for what appears to be a diachronic paradox, we show that, under a rich cartographic structure of the IP, Romanian auxiliaries systematically grammaticalize as exponents of the category mood; the auxiliaries of the now-defunct periphrases have a richer feature matrix (and this accounts for their demise). The MoodP is also the target of synthetic (finite) verb movement, hence Romanian is, (micro)parametrically, a mood-oriented language, a hypothesis which accounts for the particular diachrony of periphrastic constructions in this language, as well as other properties.