Comparative constructions in old Romanian

Afiliații

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

Istoric

Received May 23, 2017
Accepted June 6, 2017
Published September 30, 2017

Cuvinte-cheie

adjective
degree operator
comparative complement
word order
roll-up movement

Rezumat

In this paper, we analyse degree adjectival constructions in old Romanian texts. We focus on the comparative of superiority, taking into account in the first place the grammaticalization stage of the degree markers. The structures from the old texts contain polyfunctional units in competition; some of them enter a complex process of specialisation (mai ‘more’), while others disappear (camai). Afterwards, we focus on the realizations of the comparative complement in the corpus analysed: prepositional phrases headed by the prepositions ca, decît, de ‘than’. We want to see if we can establish any constraints in the use of these prepositions. We pay attention to the word order disharmonies encountered in the old texts. The configurations with pre-adjectival complements are related to the existence of certain relics of the non-configurational syntax in old Romanian.

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.