| Title: | The Origin of the Romanian “Possessive Genitival Article” Al and the Development of the Demonstrative System |
| Author: | Ion Giurgea |
| Publication: | Revue roumaine de linguistique, LVII (1), p. 35-65 |
| p-ISSN: | 0035-3957 |
| Publisher: | Editura Academiei |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Abstract: | I argue that the genitival agreeing marker al, used to introduce oblique-marked DPs and agreeing possessors, originates in a strong (i.e. non-suffixal) form of the definite article, Lat. illu(m)>*elu>alu, which in an unattested stage of Romanian behaved like present-day cel. I show that this form underwent four different reanalyses, yielding genitival al, ordinal al, alalt ‘the other’ and alde. I argue that the invariable genitival a of southern Balkan dialects and northern Romanian varieties comes from al by loss of inflection. I argue that the present-day distal demonstratives ăl(a)/al(a), aia, (a)hăl(a) etc. do not continue Latin ille (which prenominally is only continued by the article al), but represent an innovation (as first proposed by Iliescu 1967) due to the replacement of acest/cest by the forms aiest/aest/a(h)ăst/ăst, which triggered a similar replacement of acel by aiel/a(h)ăl/ăl. I then try to reconstruct the mechanism by which the reanalysis of al took place. |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 15
References in this publication: 30
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