Article
Diacronia 6, September 30, 2017, art. A92 (p. 1–13)https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A92en

Comparative constructions in old Romanian

Raluca Brăescu

Affiliations

  • “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

History

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

Key words

adjective
degree operator
comparative complement
word order
roll-up movement

Abstract

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.

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    Text:Brăescu, R. (2017). Comparative constructions in old Romanian, Diacronia 6 (September 30), A92 (1–13), https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A92en
    BibTeX:@ARTICLE{braescu2017,
     author = {Raluca Brăescu},
     title = {Comparative constructions in old Romanian},
     journal = {Diacronia},
     ISSN = {2393-1140},
     year = {2017},
     month = {September},
     number = {6},
     eid = {A92},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.17684/i6A92en},
     pages = "(1–13)",
     url = {https://www.diacronia.ro/journal/issue/6/A92/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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