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Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2017: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 31, Bucharest
Edited by Alexandru Nicolae and Adina Dragomirescu
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 355] 2021
► pp. 297–310

Moving towards an event

The Romanian prepositional supine construction

| Université Paris VIII | Université Paris Lumières & CNRS

This chapter addresses the status of the prepositional supine construction with the locative preposition la “at”, especially as complement of motion verbs. This construction encodes a goal of motion event, and it interestingly admits a continuation in which this event goal is not reached. In Romanian, locative prepositions have the following properties: (i) they select bare nouns; (ii) they can introduce dative arguments; (iii) in accomplishments, they undo the telos of the predicate when introducing an argument. The analysis proposed in this contribution provides a unified account for these three properties, in which the preposition selecting a bare noun introduces a non-achieved goal meaning in the shape of a [–bounded] Path.

Keywords: Romanian, supine, locative prepositions, irresultative predicates, dative, conative construction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Types of supine constructions
    • 2.1Clausal and prepositional supine
    • 2.2Verbal and nominal supine
    • 2.3Definite and bare supine
  • 3.The contribution of the lexical preposition
    • 3.1The conative construction, the defeasible telos and the prepositional dative
    • 3.2The prepositional supine and the unachieved goal
    • 3.3Unfolding the unachieved goal meaning
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.355.15soa
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