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The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity
Edited by Łukasz Jędrzejowski and Przemysław Staniewski
[Typological Studies in Language 131] 2021
► pp. 343–368

Syntactic patterns for Romanian olfactive verbs

| University of New Brunswick – Saint John
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.
Keywords: perception verbs, Romanian, evidentiality, syntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2Perception verbs in Romanian: short overview
  • 3.Romanian olfactive verbs: the data
  • 4.Matching configurations and interpretations
    • 4.1Mono-clausal configurations
    • 4.2Bi-clausal configurations
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Background
    • 5.2Beyond compositionality
    • 5.3Tests for [evid]
    • 5.4Typology
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Old Romanian texts
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.131.12hil
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