Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela: The syntax of Old Romanian (original) (raw)
Related papers
PANĂ DINDELEGAN, Gabriela (ed.). The Grammar of Romanian. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Isogloss, 2015
The book under review is the first comprehensive and concise descriptive grammar of contemporary Romanian language in English. As Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (Emeritus Professor at the University of Bucharest and Senior Researcher at the 'Iorgu Iordan-Alexandru Rosetti' Institute of Linguistics) points out in the preface, it should be seen as an 'essential grammar' that covers the most significant aspects of present-day Romanian. The editor highlights the modern character of the framework used, which is updated 'in conception, terminology, topics, and bibliography' (p. xxv). The grammar was written by members of the 'Iorgu Iordan-Alexandru Rosetti' Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, and benefited from Martin Maiden's (University of Oxford) editorial consultancy. Two modern Romanian Grammars served as a basis for the present book: Gramatica limbii române (2008), a modern academic grammar, and Gramatica de bază a limbii române (2010), a recent synthesis of it. The book consists of 16 chapters, a table of "Detailed contents and author attributions" (p. vii), a "Preface" (p. xxv), a page on "Notes on style and format" (p. xxvii), a list of "Abbreviations and conventions" (p. xxviii), a description of "The contributors" (p. xxxii), the "Sources" used (p. 621), a bibliography of cited works (p. 624), and an "Index" (p. 649). Chapter 1, the "Introduction" (pp. 1-17), written by Pană Dindelegan and Camelia Stan (University of Bucharest), offers a brief presentation of Romanian, where it is spoken, a genealogical definition of it, details on the age of formation and the linguistic contacts it had, with the specific observation that neither the Slavic superstratum nor other Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, modern Slavic languages, German, or modern Romance languages influences have modified the Latin structure of Romanian. The introduction also includes remarks on the transition to modern Romanian, on the history of the alphabets used, as well as on the dialectal variation found on the territory of Romania. The first part of the introduction concludes with a comment on the individual character Romanian has among other Romance languages, attributed mainly to geographical, historical, sociolinguistic conditions, and, in addition, to a permanent contact with languages belonging to the Balkan linguistic union. The last part of the first chapter summarizes the phonological and orthographic features of Romanian.
The paper examines the interpolation and scrambling phenomena attested in Old Romanian and (modern) Istro-Romanian. By applying a coherent set of syntactic diagnostics, it is shown that these phenomena may be given the same analysis in both varieties: the discontiguity of the elements of the verbal cluster is the result of low verb movement of the lexical verb on the clausal spine. In a diachronic Romance comparative setting, the existence of low verb movement phenomena constitutes an important (yet overlooked) piece of evidence for the gradual emergence of V-to-I movement in the Latin-to-Romance transition. For the theory of diachronic linguistics in general, the preservation of interpolation and scrambling in Istro-Romanian shows that archaic phenomena may be preserved in isolated varieties, and that language contact (with Croatian in the case at hand) plays an important role in consolidating archaic features.
The Grammar of Romanian (Oxford Linguistics). Ed. by Gabriela Pană Dindelegan
Isogloss. A journal on variation of Romance and Iberian languages, 2015
The book under review is the first comprehensive and concise descriptive grammar of contemporary Romanian language in English. As Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (Emeritus Professor at the University of Bucharest and Senior Researcher at the 'Iorgu Iordan-Alexandru Rosetti' Institute of Linguistics) points out in the preface, it should be seen as an 'essential grammar' that covers the most significant aspects of present-day Romanian. The editor highlights the modern character of the framework used, which is updated 'in conception, terminology, topics, and bibliography' (p. xxv). The grammar was written by members of the 'Iorgu Iordan-Alexandru Rosetti' Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy, and benefited from Martin Maiden's (University of Oxford) editorial consultancy. Two modern Romanian Grammars served as a basis for the present book: Gramatica limbii române (2008), a modern academic grammar, and Gramatica de bază a limbii române (2010), a recent synthesis of it. The book consists of 16 chapters, a table of "Detailed contents and author attributions" (p. vii), a "Preface" (p. xxv), a page on "Notes on style and format" (p. xxvii), a list of "Abbreviations and conventions" (p. xxviii), a description of "The contributors" (p. xxxii), the "Sources" used (p. 621), a bibliography of cited works (p. 624), and an "Index" (p. 649). Chapter 1, the "Introduction" (pp. 1-17), written by Pană Dindelegan and Camelia Stan (University of Bucharest), offers a brief presentation of Romanian, where it is spoken, a genealogical definition of it, details on the age of formation and the linguistic contacts it had, with the specific observation that neither the Slavic superstratum nor other Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, modern Slavic languages, German, or modern Romance languages influences have modified the Latin structure of Romanian. The introduction also includes remarks on the transition to modern Romanian, on the history of the alphabets used, as well as on the dialectal variation found on the territory of Romania. The first part of the introduction concludes with a comment on the individual character Romanian has among other Romance languages, attributed mainly to geographical, historical, sociolinguistic conditions, and, in addition, to a permanent contact with languages belonging to the Balkan linguistic union. The last part of the first chapter summarizes the phonological and orthographic features of Romanian.
Grammaticalization as pattern formation: Romanian auxiliaries from a diachronic Romance perspective
Revue roumaine de linguistique, 2020
By studying the grammaticalization of Romanian auxiliaries from a diachronic Romanian and a comparative Romance perspective, this paper argues that the output of grammaticalization is a predictable pattern in a given language, i.e. a language-specific parametric choice. Specifically, in the passage from old to modern Romanian we observe that a number of emergent periphrastic structures (innovations in contrast to Latin) died out, against the well-known transition from syntheticity to analyticity in the development of the Romance languages (i.e. the profusion of auxiliary structures in this particular situation). In order to account for what appears to be a diachronic paradox, we show that, under a rich cartographic structure of the IP, Romanian auxiliaries systematically grammaticalize as exponents of the category mood; the auxiliaries of the now-defunct periphrases have a richer feature matrix (and this accounts for their demise). The MoodP is also the target of synthetic (finite) verb movement, hence Romanian is, (micro)parametrically, a mood-oriented language, a hypothesis which accounts for the particular diachrony of periphrastic constructions in this language, as well as other properties.
Romanian Language and Linguistics (2013)
Parkinson, Stephen (ed.). The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 75 (2013). London/Manchester: Modern Humanities Research Association/Maney, pp. 270-90, 2015
1. general the period under review has seen the publication of extensive collections of selected works by two eminent Romanian linguists, making their oeuvre, including some lesser-known publications, accessible to a present-day readership: Valeria guţu Romalo, Periplu lingvistic. Studii şi reflecţii, editura academiei Române, 783 pp., contains 115 articles and chapters in chronological order, published over a period of more than half a century, that reflect the author's changing research focus but also her overarching desire to gain new insights into all aspects of the structure of the Romanian language, be it in the areas of syntax, morphology, phonology, or pragmatics. emanuel Vasiliu, Teorie şi analiză în lingvistică, ed. marina Rădulescu Sala, editura academiei Române, 2012, 425 pp., is a posthumous collection of 48 publications, many of them hitherto not easily accessible, which reflect the theoretical nature of V.'s approach to a wide range of linguistic topics; the volume is subdivided into five sections: general linguistics; phonetics, phonology and dialectology; grammar; semantics, pragmatics and stylistics; and a short final section with two contributions on textuality and intertextuality.
(Non-)Configurationality and the Internal Syntax of Adjectives in Old Romanian
This paper deals with three phenomena specific to old Romanian: prehead complements to adjectives (i.e., head-final adjectival structures), postadjectival degree markers, and discontinuous adjectival and degree phrases. Following recent work by Adam Ledgeway, we defend the hypothesis that the old Romanian adjectival phrase preserves relics of the head-final and non-configurational syntax of Latin. The fact that prehead complements of adjectives and postadjectival degree markers represent a genuine instance of head-finality (i.e., roll-up movement) is reinforced by the existence of discontinuous adjectival phrases (the hallmark of non-configurationality), discontinuous structures being unavailable in harmonic head-initial systems (Ledgeway, in press).
(Pseudo)cleft constructions in old Romanian
Diacronia
The article examines the syntactic and semantic features of cleft sentences in Old Romanian (OR) as compared to Modern Romanian (MR). The clefting strategy in MR can only produce pseudo-cleft constructions (identifying structures with free relative clauses headed by ce, or relative clauses with an antecedent; the focalized constituent follows the relative clause and the copula; the reversed pattern is also possible: the focalized constituent is placed before the copula and the relative clause). The analysis of an OR corpus showed that cleft constructions were quite frequent, but the patterns were more diverse than in MR: besides cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions, OR also employed hybrid constructions, that amalgamate the features of the prototypical clefts.