Ilioaia The MIHI EST construction

An instance of non-canonical subject marking in Romanian
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-105546-6
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 481, 356 Seiten

Reihe: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische PhilologieISSN

This book examines the Romanian construction ( / , me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a structure, the pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries.

The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?

Zielgruppe

Linguists

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ilioaia, Mihaela

Über Autor(innen)

Mihaela Ilioaia , Ghent University, Belgium.