Morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot in old Romanian

Afiliații

• Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Str. Edgar Quinet 5–7, Sector 1, 010017 Bucharest, Romania
• “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics, Calea 13 Septembrie 13, 050711 Bucharest, Romania

Istoric

Received May 26, 2017
Accepted June 3, 2017
Published September 30, 2017

Cuvinte-cheie

indefinite pronoun
indefinite adjective
quantifier
old Romanian
variation

Rezumat

This article establishes and discusses a series of morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot ‘whole, all’ in old Romanian, relating them to modern Romanian: forms that disappeared from the language, a wider variety of singular and plural genitive-dative markers (synthetic, analytic and mixed), the more permissive word order and the possibility to occur in a structure with an undetermined noun. The description of the grammatical characteristics of the quantifier tot highlights a great variation: (i) between the synthetic, analytic and mixed realization of the genitive-dative case (toatei all.F.SG.GEN≡DAT ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun, a/la/de toată A/LA/DE all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + nominative-accusative noun, a toată A all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun); (ii) between the (pronominal and adjectival) form with the final particle –a and the one without –a (tuturor, tuturora ‘of all / to all’; tuturor oamenilor ‘of/to all the people’, tuturora fraților ‘of/to all the brothers’); (iii) between the postposition and anteposition of tot relative to certain pronouns (ei toți, toți ei ‘all of them’); (iv) between structures with a determined and an undetermined noun (toate zilele, toate zile ‘all the days’). The comparison with the modern language shows that, in some cases, this variation has been eliminated, and in other cases, it is preserved.

Drepturi de autor

© 2017 Autorii. Drepturile de publicare aparțin Revistei. Textul este accesibil în mod gratuit, în concordanță cu prevederile licenței Open Access CC-BY.