Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting

Chapter 6 highlights the novel theoretical and empirical facts brought about by the word order changes that occurring in the passage from old to modern Romanian, showing how the diachrony of Romanian may contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Romance languages and of the Balkan Sprachbund, as well as to syntactic theory and syntactic change in general. One important dimension of diachronic variation and change is the height of nouns and verbs along their extended projections (lower vs higher V- and N-movement). The two perspectives from which language contact proves relevant in the diachronic development of word order in Romanian, language contact by means of translation and areal language contact, are discussed. The chapter also addresses the issue of surface analogy vs deep structural properties; once again, Romanian emerges as a Romance language in a Balkan suit, as Romance deep structural properties are instantiated by means of Balkan word order patterns.

Word order and parameter change in Romanian

This chapter introduces the phenomena to be studied in detail in the monograph (verb–auxiliary inversion; pronominal enclisis; scrambling; interpolation; the low definite article; changes in the position and linearization of adjectives; hyperbaton; demonstrative specialization; emergence of the freestanding determiner cel) and the theoretical framework adopted; presents the methodology and methodological difficulties, the periodization of Romanian, and the corpus; and discusses the issue of ‘foreign’ syntactic features in the syntax of old Romanian.

Demonstrative specialization and the emergence of the determiner cel

The first part of the chapter discusses the gradual steps of the diachronic specialization of Romanian demonstratives, the effect of which is a strict correlation between morphological strength (weak/strong) and syntactic status (head/phrase). The postnominal demonstrative construction of modern Romanian is shown to emerge diachronically from the structural simplification of a biphrasal appositional construction in a parametrically ambiguous context. The adjacency constraints active in DPs with postnominal demonstratives result from the phrasal status of strong demonstratives in conjunction with the general DP-internal movement options of modern Romanian. One of the effects of the specialization of demonstratives is the detachment of a distal weak form from the class of demonstratives (i.e. cel), and its grammaticalization as a freestanding definite determiner with special distributional and interpretative properties in Romanian; the development of the cel-constructions is taken up in the second part of the chapter.

Discontiguous linearizations in the sentential core

This chapter analyses two distinct phenomena found in old and modern Romance varieties, namely ‘interpolation’ and ‘scrambling’, against the data of old Romanian. Unified by the non-adjacency between higher functional elements (clitics and auxiliary verbs) and the lexical verb, interpolation and scrambling are discussed under the blanket term ‘discontiguous linearizations in the sentential core’ and are shown to be derived in old Romanian through lower verb movement along the clausal spine. The existence of lower verb movement in old Romanian supports an important aspect of the diachrony of V-raising in Romanian and in the Romance languages: generalized V-to-I movement is not attained only through the reanalysis of a relaxed V2 grammar (specific to matrix clauses), but also through a gradual process of V-raising to the left along the clausal spine (characterizing embedded clauses). Discontiguous linearizations involving higher functional elements and modal complex predicates bring evidence for the analysis of interpolation and scrambling.

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.

Inversion as a residual old Romance V2 grammar

This chapter focuses on ‘inversion’ in the verbal domain (i.e. verb–auxiliary and verb–pronominal clitic linearizations) and shows that old Romanian inversion represents the residual instantiation of an old Romance V2 grammar by means of a word order pattern widespread in the Balkan languages – the so-called ‘Long Head Movement’ pattern. Prior to its complete jettison, residual V2 is reanalysed as a focus-marking strategy. Patterns of pronominal cliticization, the structure of auxiliary-based analytic constructions, verb-initial structures, the height (V-to-I vs V-to-C movement) and strategy (head vs phrasal movement) of V-raising in Romanian, the syntax of adverbial clitics, as well as quantitative analyses of the distribution of V-to-C movement vs V-to-I movement are addressed in the analysis of the V2 phenomenon with reference to old Romanian.