Features of noun quantifiers in old Romanian
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 18, 2017
Accepted June 4, 2017
Published September 30, 2017
Abstract
This study is part of a collective research on the historical morphology of Romanian, conducted at the Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. This analysis approaches in detail a specific issue in the diachrony of noun quantifiers, more precisely, the tendency towards internal fusion which compound ordinal numerals showed in old Romanian (the 16th to 18th centuries). The tendency towards formal unity determined certain changes in the morphology and syntax of numerals. Thus, the aim of this analysis is to highlight and explain the morphosyntactic manifestations of this process. Therefore, the forms of the numeral are discussed in relation to the syntactic structure of the quantified nominal phrase. The framework adopted here is the theory of grammaticalization, and contemporary diachronic syntax. The analysis of the old structures containing ordinal numerals allows us to formulate observations related to: the inflectional features of the ordinal numerals and their combination with articles, the grammaticalization degree of the formative al, the origin of the enclitic formatives –l(u)/–le/–lea, –a, and the ordering of these formatives.
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.