Article Drop and Case Marking in Romanian
Giurgea, Ion (Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy)

Date:	2024
Abstract:	In Romanian, the definite article cannot be overtly realized if the maximal nominal projection contains only the lexical N and occurs in the complement position of (most) accusative-taking prepositions. Arguing that a definite D is present in the underlying syntactic representation, I describe article drop as a PF-phenomenon. I follow Dobrovie-Sorin's (2007) idea that article drop is conditioned by a complex head formation operation that assigns a X0-status to DPs of the form [D+def N0], but I show that her proposal of extending complex head formation to P is contradicted by the behavior of article drop in coordination. Therefore, I propose a different explanation for the limitation of article drop to the complement of P: based on the fact that article drop also occurs with prepositional case markers (which are K heads rather than Ps), I propose that article drop only occurs when D lacks Case. Underlying this analysis is a novel theory of case marking in Romanian: I propose that inflectional marking involves null Ks that trigger spreading of a Case feature to their complement (following Norris 2014, 2018), whereas prepositional marking involves an overt K and no feature spreading. Prepositions that trigger article drop are assimilated to K heads in that they take a DP, rather than a KP, complement, playing K's role of closing-off the nominal extended projection.
Note:	Altres ajuts: Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS -UEFISCDI, within PNCDI III (PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-0042)
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Definiteness ; Article ; Prepositions ; Case ; Romanian
Published in:	Isogloss, Vol. 10 Núm. 2 (2024) , p. 1-23 (Articles) , ISSN 2385-4138

Adreça original: https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v10-n2-giurgea
DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.286

23 p, 379.1 KB

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