Romanian Evidentials

This paper contains an investigation of some aspects of Romanian modality constructed with auxiliaries. These forms can be combined either with the infinitive, or with overt (imperfective /perfective) aspectual morphology. In the latter case, they might give rise to interpretations which have been classified in Romanian grammars as presumptive (broadly described as referring to probability, uncertainty, guess). In these contexts, all the auxiliaries are traditionally taken to be synonymous. This paper demonstrates that this conclusion cannot hold; a more in-depth examination shows instead that each modal auxiliary encodes a specific type of indirect source of information the proposition is based upon. In other words, Romanian modal auxiliaries have an individual indirect evidential component. The application of canonical tests used in the literature supports a modal analysis of Romanian evidentials, as opposed to an alternative illocutionary operator account. Another characteristic of modal auxiliaries that is touched upon is the nature of the ambiguity relations with their perfective forms. It is assumed, following recent accounts by Condoravdi (2001), Ippolito (2002, et subseq.), Copley (2002), among others, that the ways in which temporal/aspectual heads interact with modal projections are responsible for various interpretations. For example, when temporal/aspectual heads are above the modal, counterfactual readings arise. When they are below the modal, only evidential interpretations are possible

DPs in adjectival small clauses in Romanian: a diachronic perspective

This paper focuses on some diachronic data from Romanian concerning adjectival predicates under intensional verbs (consider-Adj. types). The interest in these constructions resides not only in their contribution to the investigation of one of the most versatile structures in human language, namely small clauses, but also in their relevance for understanding the Romanian DPs and DOM strategies, due to the salient diachronic stability of important structural properties of these configurations. It is proposed that a complex predicate analysis employing a Multiple Agreement Mechanism is able to derive the strong/specific readings of the shared arguments under discussion; the variation in the DOM marking of pronouns is correlated to a plausibly more recent development of the definiteness scale for differential marking in Romanian, complementary to the animacy scale

Indirect evidentiality and related domains: some observations from the current evolution of the Romanian presumptive.

One distinguishing feature of the Romanian tense-aspect-mood (hence- forth, TAM) domain is the presence of a morpho-syntactic paradigm tradi- tionally labelled the presumptive mood. As noticed several times (Slave 1957, Goudet 1977, Dimitriu 1979, Irimia 1983, Friedman 1986, 2004, Av- ram and Hill 2007, Squartini 2001, 2005, Irimia 2010) this class poses par- ticular theoretical challenges regarding its composition and morphology. Its highly idiosyncratic character is manifested by the presence of unique mor- phological patterns which nevertheless make use of morphological pieces (auxiliaries, participials) which can also be mapped to slightly distinct se- mantics when combined with distinct building blocks. Nevertheless, in the perfect forms, the indirect evidential semantics of the presumptive illus- trates formal syncretism with interpretations corresponding to other modals, like the conditional, or the future, which are normally considered to create individual paradigms (as they are morphologically individuated in the non-perfect uses). And yet another important observation is that in modern Romanian some non-perfect (present) sub-paradigms of the pre- sumptive are morphologically decaying, while their semantics is transferred to the non-perfect forms of the related TAM paradigms. The Romanian presumptive constitutes therefore an excellent testing ground for at least two directions in languages: i) the structure and the development of indirect evidentiality; ii) the morphological distribution of TAM notions, and their interactions. This paper proposes a morpho-semantic analysis of the struc- ture of indirect evidentiality in Romanian,..

How to turn into a resultative

The presence of resultative secondary predicates (RESSP) is taken to be a robust correlate of ‘satellite-framed’ languages (Talmy 1975, 1985, 2000, a.o.). However, it also appears that languages which might be classified as ‘verb-framed’ under other diagnostics do tolerate some restricted types of resultativity. In order to better understand the sources and limits of the ‘resultative parameter’ (Kratzer 2005), this paper investigates the nature of a largely ignored construction with resultative semantics in Romanian (Romance), the BARE NOUN RESULT (BNRES). These data indicate that cross-linguistic variation in the construction of RESSP is dependent on (at least) two factors: a) distinctions in the featural composition of the functional projections constructing resultativity; b) whether resultativity is dependent on telicity/syntactic directed motion or not (see also Folli and Harley 2006). The paper proposes that the BNRES contains a functional projection specified as TURN-INTO, which introduces a resultative NP, in the absence of syntactic composition of manner and directed motion

When Differential Object Marking is Obligatory: Some Remarks on the Role of Case in Ellipsis and Comparatives

The identity condition in ellipsis has received a great deal of attention in formal studies, one of the most prominent topics of inquiry being its precise nature. This paper contributes to this debate by examining a rather ignored equative (equality comparative) context where unexpected differential object marking is obligatory irrespective of its canonical features. The data come from Romance (taking Romanian as a representative sample) and one Indo-Aryan variety, namely Nepali. We show that such marking poses a challenge to most theories examining the precise nature of the identity condition in ellipsis and comparatives. The answer we propose follows mixed theories (Mártin González 2016); crucially, we also show that (some types of) Case identity can be reduced to the requirement of certain structures to manipulate arguments instead of predicates (oftype). Our remarks are relevant to licensing of arguments and identity conditions that go beyond ellipsis

Manifestations of differential object marking: from Brazilian Portuguese to prepositional accusatives

The null object/overt pronoun split in Brazilian Portuguese has been assimilated to differential object marking in some functionalist accounts (Schwenter and Silva 2002, Schwenter 2006). This paper examines further arguments for this connection; we evaluate a battery of more formal diagnostics under which the Brazilian Portuguese data pattern similarly to canonical instances of prepositional marking across Romance (Romanian, Spanish, etc.). The application of other tests weakens the assumption of a unique licensing position for differentially marked objects in Romance languages

Epistemic comparatives: a cross-linguistic investigation

This paper contains a cross-linguistic investigation of epistemic comparatives that reveals two novel observations: i) some languages allow these constructions with the indicative present, while others require overt modal morphology; ii) the split seems to correlate with the presence of indexical present, as detected by Sequence Of Tense phenomena (SOT). More specifically, epistemic comparatives with indicative present tend to occur in non-SOT languages. We account for these observations by combining recent formalizations of anchoring to the Speaker's Perspective (e.g., Wiltschko 2014) with Giorgi's 2010 analysis of SOT phenomena. The findings reported in the paper contribute to uncovering a deeper connection between two apparently distinct phenomena: SOT and epistemic comparatives

Anchoring in grammar: puzzles with epistemic comparatives

This paper discusses two puzzles with epistemic comparatives (ECs) that provide new insights into the interaction between modals, tense, and aspect. We show that, cross- linguistically, ECs pose restrictions on the featural specifications in T(ense). Additionally, we observe that interactions of ECs with modals seem to be non-uniform; while epistemic modals can co-occur with ECs, some modal interpretations of the Romance imperfect ap- pear to be deviant. The analysis we propose sheds light on how anchoring to the Speaker’s Deictic Center in the highest left periphery is manipulated by T and modals (Speas and Tenny 2003, Giorgi 2010, Wiltschko 2014). We argue that interactions between ECs and modals are in fact uniform, as predicted by our analysis. The deviance of the modal imper- fect with ECs is due to an independent reaso