Article published in:
Adjectives in Germanic and Romance
Edited by Petra Sleeman, Freek Van de Velde and Harry Perridon
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 212] 2014
► pp. 199–216

The mixed categorial behavior of cel + participle in Romanian

| University of Amsterdam
The traditional distinction between verbal and adjectival participles has been fine-grained in the last decades. Recently, Sleeman (2011) brought evidence that Germanic languages display two types of verbal participles: the fully eventive and the less fully eventive one. Using evidence from the Romanian present participle in modifier position, this paper argues that these two types of verbal participles also exist in Romance languages. Next to the fully eventive verbal participle, Romanian displays a less fully eventive structure, containing a verbal present participle preceded by the determiner cel, which typically selects adjectives. Evidence for the lower eventivity of the cel-verbal participle configuration will come from lexical aspect.
Published online: 18 February 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.212.08nic
References

References

Borer, Hagit
2005 Structuring Sense: The Normal Course of Events. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan
1982 The passive in lexical theory. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Joan Bresnan (ed.), 3–86. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Campos, Héctor & Stavrou, Melita
2004 Polydefinites in Greek and Aromanian. In Balkan Syntax and Semantics [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 67], Olga Tomic (ed.), 137–173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coene, Martine
1999 Definite Null Nominals in Romanian and Spanish. PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
1976 Aspect. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Cornilescu, Alexandra
1992 Remarks on the determiner system of Rumanian: The demonstratives al and cel. Probus 4(3): 189–260. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2001 Romanian nominalizations: Case and aspectual structure. Journal of Linguistics 37(3): 467–501. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006 Modes of semantic combinations: NP/DP. Adjectives and the structure of the Romanian DP. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2004 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 278], Jenny Doetjes & Paz Gonzales (eds), 43–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cornilescu, Alexandra & Nicolae, Alexandru
2011 Nominal peripheries and phase structure in the Romanian DP. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 1 : 35–68.Google Scholar
Dowty, David R.
1979 Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in Montague’s PTQ. Dordrecht: Reidel. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Embick, David
2004 On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35(3): 355–392. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec
1993 Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Kenneth Hale & Samuel J. Keyser (eds), 111–176. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika
1994 The event argument and the semantics of voice. Ms, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
2000 Building statives. In Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Lisa J. Conathan, Jeff Good, Darya Kavitskaya, Alyssa B. Wulf & Alan C.L. Yu (eds), 385–399. Berkeley CA: University of California.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth & Rappaport Hovav, Malka
1995 Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Maienborn, Claudia
2005 On the limits of the Davidsonian approach: The case of copula sentences. Theoretical Linguistics 31(3): 275–316. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 On Davidsonian and Kimian states. In Existence: Semantics and Syntax, Ileana Comorovski & Klaus von Heusinger (eds), 107–132. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marchiş, Mihaela & Alexiadou, Artemis
2009 On the distribution of adjectives in Romanian: The cel construction. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory [romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1], Enoch Aboh, Elisabeth van der Linden, Josep Quer & Petra Sleeman (eds), 161–178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Parsons, Terence
1990 Events in the Semantics of English: A Study in Subatomic Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pustejovsky, James
1995 The generative lexicon. Computational Linguistics 17(4): 409–441.Google Scholar
Ramchand, Gillian C.
2008 Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. A First-phase Syntax. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rothmayr, Antonia
2009 The Structure of Stative Verbs [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 143]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sleeman, Petra
2011 Verbal and adjectival participles: Internal structure and position. Lingua 121: 1569–1587. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vendler, Zeno
1967 Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Verkuyl, Henk J.
1989 Aspectual classes and aspectual composition. Linguistics and Philosophy 12: 39–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, Thomas
1977 Transformations and the lexicon. In Formal Syntax, Peter Culicover, Thomas Wasow & Adrian Akmajian (eds), 327–360. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar