This paper contrasts the dative/accusative alternations in Romance languages with Romanian: In Romance, this alternation mediates the emergence of a DOM particle for direct objects, in addition to the preservation of the same particle with the indirect object (morphological extension). The case… read more
Romanian olfactive verbs generate two readings: One that captures the physical olfactive perception, and one that expresses a cognitive/inferential process. While this is cross-linguistically unsurprising, the Romanian data are informative when it comes to the factors responsible for the two… read more
Gerund verbs generate root clauses in Old Romanian (OR), but not in Modern Romanian (MR). We argue that the root clause phenomenon arises from the presence of a null Assertion Operator in OR, which has been lost in MR. This Operator originates from the mapping of discourse features to syntax, but… read more
The supine starts to occur in Early Modern Romanian (EMR) by the late 16th century, during the general process of replacement of infinitives in subordinated clauses. The supine replaces the infinitive in non-finite relative clauses. In this article, I argue that EMR, but not other languages (e.g.,… read more
This paper focuses on Romanian main clauses that display the complementizer ‘that’, and may also allow for the re-iteration of this element at the left periphery. The analysis capitalizes on the proposal in current studies that a field for encoding conversational pragmatics is projected at the left… read more
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 >… read more
This paper argues that an approach to the Romanian C(litic) D(oubling) from a pragmatics-semantics perspective produces a systematic account for three peculiarities of this construction; namely, the obligatory particle pe preceding the D(irect) O(bject) dp, the interaction between this type of… read more