Full Description
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century, the date of the earliest attested Romanian texts, and the end of the eighteenth century, generally considered to mark the start of the modernization of Romanian. Gabriela Pană Dindelegan and her co-authors adopt both a synchronic and diachronic approach by providing a detailed corpus analysis in a given period, while also comparing old and modern Romanian. They examine the evolution of a variety of syntactic phenomena, including the elimination or diminishing of certain facts or generalization of others, the total or partial grammaticalization of phenomena, competition between structures, and cases of syntactic variation. The book takes a typological and comparative perspective, focusing on those phenomena that are considered specific to Romanian (either on the Romance or in the Balkan area), and adopts a modern framework while still remaining accessible to readers from any background.
Contents
Preface ; Abbreviations and conventions ; The contributors ; 1. Introduction ; 2. The verb and its arguments ; 3. Non-finite verb forms and non-finite constructions ; 4. The nominal phrase ; 5. Adjectives and adjectival phrases ; 6. Adverbs and adverbial phrases ; 7. Prepositions and prepositional phrases ; 8. Coordination and coordinating conjunctions ; 9. The complex clause ; 10. Word order and configurationality ; 11. Clausal organization and discourse phenomena ; 12. Conclusions ; Appendix 1: Corpus ; Appendix 2: Map. Regional distribution of the main old Romanian texts ; References ; Index
