Mental distress or physical inconvenience (except consequent on personal injury or death)

Mental distress covers, for example, disappointment, worry, anxiety, fear, upset, and annoyance. On the traditional approach taken by the courts, mental distress, along with ‘pain and suffering’ consequent on a personal injury and ‘bereavement’, compensated under the Fatal Accidents Act 1976, are the heads of non-pecuniary loss covering the claimant’s loss of happiness and distress in contrast to the other ‘objective’ non-pecuniary losses (such as ‘loss of amenity’ consequent on a personal injury and ‘loss of reputation’). On an alternative view, all non-pecuniary loss is regarded as ultimately dealing with distress or loss of happiness and ‘mental distress’ is seen as a residual head for distress not falling within any of the other heads.

Word order in the nominal phrase

This chapter examines the main changes in the syntax of Romanian nominal phrases as they are reflected in the ordering of DP-internal constituents. The first part of the chapter focuses on the ‘low definite article’, i.e. structures in which the noun bearing the definite article occupies a non-DP-initial position. The low definite article is relevant to the emergence of the Romanian article (its suffixal nature singles out Romanian in Romance) on the one hand and to the understanding of the freer DP-internal word order characteristic of old Romanian on the other hand. The changes in the position of adjectives relative to the head noun and in the linearization of adjectives with respect to one another are then addressed. Finally, residual head-final structures in the nominal and adjectival domain and discontinuous constituents are analysed.