Part of
The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic DiversityEdited by Łukasz Jędrzejowski and Przemysław Staniewski
[Typological Studies in Language 131] 2021
► pp. 343–368
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 readings. In this respect, this chapter argues that we do not need two lexical entries for these interpretations, as the second one can be read off the syntactic configuration. Along these lines, the direct evidence for smelling is encoded lexically, whereas the indirect evidence involved in the inferential readings arises from the mapping of evidentiality as a formal feature [evid] at the edge of vP.