| Title: | A few notes on the ‘need’ field in Romanian |
| Author: | Oana Săvescu |
| Publication: | Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, XII (2) |
| p-ISSN: | 2069-9239 |
| Publisher: | Universitatea din București |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2010 |
| Abstract: | Isachenko (1974) proposed that in Russian, the absence of a (transitive) verb ‘need’ of the English type (I need a book) correlates with the absence of possessive ‘have’. Following Isachenko’s insight, Kayne (2007) further proposed that the English verb need is derived by incorporation of the noun need into have. This paper discusses the behavior of Romanian a trebui ‘must/need’, which, unlike English need, is not transitive, although Romanian is otherwise a ‘have’ language, much like English. It will be argued that despite the differences between Romanian a trebui ‘must/need’ and English need, a modification of Kayne’s (2007) incorporation proposal is also tenable for Romanian. It will be further shown that a trebui ‘must/need’ can also express deontic obligation and an analysis will be presented whereby deontic a trebui ‘must/need’ originates in an existential configuration. This analysis can arguably also account for three other types of related constructions expressing deontic modality in Romanian. |
| Key words: | possession, modality, incorporation, existential constructions |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
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