Article
Diacronia 6, September 30, 2017, art. A82 (p. 1–10)https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A82en

Old Romanian pluralized mass and abstract nouns

Gabriela Pană Dindelegan

Affiliations

  • 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

History

Received May 8, 2017
Accepted June 3, 2017
Published September 30, 2017

Key words

old Romanian
mass noun
abstract noun
pluralization
lexical plural

Abstract

The analysis of a rich old Romanian corpus shows that the ‘pluralization’ of mass and abstract nouns is extremely frequent in old Romanian. The semantic effects of pluralization are similar for mass and abstract nouns, consisting in the creation of denotative and/or connotative semantic variants. Of the plural endings, –uri is specialized for the pluralization of mass nouns in Daco-Romanian. The evolution of the ending –uri illustrates the specific process by which a grammatical (plural) morpheme is converted into a lexical morpheme (the so-called ‘lexical plurals’). ‘Lexical plurals’ have isolated occurrences in other Romance languages, but they have not reached the spread and regularity they display in Romanian.

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    Text:Dindelegan, G. P. (2017). Old Romanian pluralized mass and abstract nouns, Diacronia 6 (September 30), A82 (1–10), https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A82en
    BibTeX:@ARTICLE{pana dindelegan2017,
     author = {Gabriela Pană Dindelegan},
     title = {Old Romanian pluralized mass and abstract nouns},
     journal = {Diacronia},
     ISSN = {2393-1140},
     year = {2017},
     month = {September},
     number = {6},
     eid = {A82},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A82en},
     pages = "(1–10)",
     url = {https://www.diacronia.ro/journal/issue/6/A82/en}
    }

Copyright

© 2017 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.

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