Virginia Hill | University of New Brunswick – Saint John
This paper proposes a diachronic syntactic analysis of the Romanian verb putea “can”. It is argued that the grammaticalization of putea consists of several upward reanalyses, and the gradual stripping of semantic features set off its reclassification as control verb > raising verb > auxiliary > pragmatic marker. This analysis accounts for ambiguous epistemic/deontic readings on the modal, which were considered mysterious under lexical/semantic approaches; it also explains why infinitive verbs are so productive as complements to the modal; and it points out that conversational pragmatic features must be factored in as triggers of syntactic reanalysis.
2024. Istro-Romanian Subjunctive Clauses. Languages 9:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Irimia, Monica Alexandrina
2018. Pragmatics or morpho-syntax? The encoding of indirect evidentiality in Romanian. Journal of Pragmatics 128 ► pp. 148 ff.
Abraham, Werner
2015. Strong modality and truth disposability in syntactic subordination: What is the locus of the phase edge validating modal adverbials?. Studia Linguistica 69:2 ► pp. 119 ff.
Abraham, Werner
2020. Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics,
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