Alexandru Mardale

Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales | INALCO · Europe

This study investigates the production of subject and object restrictive relatives in child heritage Romanian in contact with French. The main goal is to evaluate to what extent input reduction over a longer period of time, during the developmental stages following onset of schooling, may trigger language deterioration, incomplete acquisition or la...

In contemporary Romanian, differential object marking is undergoing a change from a system allowing two marking patterns in optional contexts to a system which preserves only one of these patterns. In the present study we verify if child heritage speakers opt for the novel system at a level beyond the one in the input. The data come from 34 narrati...

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the hypotheses relevant to the origin and the evolution of pe as a DOM particle in Romanian. As a contribution to this debate, the chapter demonstrates that pe went through a Case marking functional preposition stage at some point before the earliest preserved texts, at which time it did not serve for DOM. Eventual...

Chapter 3 focuses on DOM in Old Romanian, for both direct and indirect objects. The data are organized according to the type of DOM mechanisms, with separate sections for CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p. The focus is on the pragmatic effects of DOM, since this operation is discourse triggered in Old Romanian (i.e., CD for backgrounding, as opposed to DOM-p...

Chapter 2 provides the cross-linguistic background for the discussion of Romanian DOM. First, a short overview of some properties of Romanian grammar points to mixed Balkan and Romance morpho-syntactic patterns throughout this grammar. Thus, the evidence for a similar typological mix in DOM constructions is not surprising. Second, an overview of DO...

Chapter 7 adopts a cartographic representation of nominal phrases that provides the basis on which a formal analysis is developed for Romanian DOM. The gist is that the triggers for DOM operate within the nominal domain in Romanian (as in Sardinian and unlike Spanish), which accounts for the insensitivity of Romanian verbs to marked versus unmarked...

Chapter 4 focuses on DOM in Modern Romanian, for both direct and indirect objects. The data are organized according to the type of DOM mechanisms, with separate sections for CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p. The pragmatic effects noticed for Old Romanian DOM are re-assessed, considering that the contrasting interpretation of CD versus DOM-p is neutralized....

Chapter 6 introduces the formal perspectives on DOM relevant to the data presented in this book. In a nutshell, the chapter reviews current cross-linguistic analyses of DOM, especially those proposed for Spanish DOM, and verifies them against the Romanian data. The comparative tests indicate that the analyses in López (2012) and Ordóñez & Roca (201...

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the origins, development, and stabilization of differential object marking (DOM) in Romanian. DOM, a means by which a grammar distinguishes between objects based on semantic features such as animacy or definiteness, has been a fruitful area of research in syntax, historical linguistics, and typolo...

In this paper, we discuss synchronic and diachronic Romanian data that show the range of prepositional means to mark the semantic role E-TOPIC introduced in Onea and Mardale 2020. We observe a great variation in prepositional usage in Old Romanian and a clear specialization of the preposition despre in Modern Romanian as a marker of the E-TOPIC rol...

In this paper, we provide new evidence for the hypothesis that in some languages, Differential Object Marking (DOM) may have evolved from marking of the information structural category of TOPICALITY. While Iemmolo (2010) suggested that topic left-dislocation might have facilitated the evolution of DOM, and Dalrymple and Nikolaeva (2011) argued for...

This special issue includes a selection of papers that were presented at the international workshop themed Differential Object Marking and Language Contact that was organised by Anton Antonov (INaLCO, CRLAO) and Alexandru Mardale (INaLCO, SeDyL) in Paris on 5 and 6 December 2014 as part of the Unity and Diversity in Differential Object Marking rese...

Differential Object Marking (DOM), a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons, has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by mo...

This paper focuses on differential object marking (DOM) in Old Romanian (OR) and the extent to which the diachronic development of this operation is influenced by language contact. We address two problems: (i) the DOM mechanism for direct objects (DOs) is unstable (Rosetti 1986; Mardale 2009, 2015; Stark 2011; Stan 2013; SOR 2016); (ii) historical...

This paper starts from the observation that, diachronically, the differential marking of direct objects in Romanian went through different stages, each of which attests to a different syntactic mechanism; i.e. from no marking to a stage with marking through either clitic doubling (CD) or differential par- ticles (DOM) and further to a stage where t...

In this paper, we investigate complex adpositions in Romanian, on the basis of a corpus study. Our goal is to provide an extensive list of complex adpositions and analyze the productivity of various patterns. In order to do so, we selected a number of candidate sequences, applied semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and evaluated their frequency. O...

This paper starts with the observation that clitic doubling and DOM-pe may alternate as differential marking mechanisms for direct objects. Our hypothesis is that the clitic and pe are able to substitute to each other for the object marking purpose. We propose that the clitic and pe compete for merging in the same functional head at the left periph...

Notre étude se propose de replacer le roumain dans la typologie des verbes de mouvement proposée par Talmy (1991), en particulier par rapport aux autres langues romanes, sur la base d'une tâche d'élicitation à l'aide de vidéos. Nous comparons les données ainsi obtenues avec les données correspondantes en italien et en français. Les résultats indiqu...

This paper deals with the distribution and the interpretation of the subjunctive in Romanian, focusing on its morpho-syntactic pattern and its use in main interrogative clauses, where it displays Balkan Sprachbund properties. First, we provide evidence for the impact of the Balkan pattern by demonstrating an affixal status for the Romanian subjunct...

Nous décrivons ici l’emploi de deux prépositions lexicales du roumain, à savoir p(r)e et spre, dans un texte représentatif du 16ème siècle (l’Évangile du diacre Coresi). Nous montrons qu’elles ont toutes les deux un usage fréquent et qu’elles expriment une large variété de sens : des sens circonstanciels (principalement locatifs), mais aussi plus a...

This paper deals with the distribution and the interpretation of the subjunctive in Romanian, focusing on its morpho-syntactic pattern and its use in main interrogative clauses, where it displays Balkan Sprachbund properties. First, we provide evidence for the impact of the Balkan pattern by demonstrat- ing an affixal status for the Romanian subjun...

The key question in this paper is the following: why do Differential Object Marking (DOM) and Clitic Doubling (CD) interact in Modern Romanian, since that was not necessarily the case in Old Romanian? The hypothesis we defend relies on the presence of a topic feature at the left periphery of DOM-ed noun projections: the bleaching of this feature, r...

In this paper, I describe the use of the oblique cases (Dative and Genitive) in Present-Day Romanian. I show that their most frequent realizations in spoken language are not synthetic (i.e. inflectional) forms, as recommended in the standard use of the language, but rather analytical forms (i.e. with prepositions).

Le marquage différentiel de l'objet (MDO, cf. Bossong 1985), connu également comme « accusatif prépositionnel » dans la linguistique romane (cf. Niculescu 1959, 1965), se réfère à un phénomène très répandu dans les langues du monde. Il désigne les constructions dans lesquelles un objet (direct, la plupart du temps) est marqué par une préposition gr...

The present study investigates the question of the (possible) origins of a well-known phenomenon found in almost all Romance languages: differential object marking (DOM), or prepositional accusative, in which a preposition (resulting from Latin ad, except for Romanian) introduces a specific type of (direct) object. Given the fact that these constru...

This paper focuses on the application of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Old Romanian such as reflected in DÎ, which is a 16th-17th century collection of documents written directly in Romanian. The investigation is twofold: (i) I identify the contexts that led to the reanalysis of the lexical preposition pe as a DOM element; (ii) I compare the...

Nous étudions le phénomène du marquage différentiel de l'objet (MDO) en français. Ce phénomène apparaît dans la plupart des langues romanes et est parfois consi-déré comme inexistant en français, alors même qu'il est bien attesté au moins régionalement. Nous cherchons ici à établir les limites de ce phénomène, à partir d'une large étude sur corpus,...

Romanian displays two types of complex PPs (i.e. PPs formed on at least two simple Ps), which may attach to Ns. The first one is headed by a combination of two (and very rarely three) lexical Ps, e. g. de la ‘from’, pe sub ‘under’, pe lângă ‘near’, de pe lângă ‘from near’ (e.g. venirea lui de la Londra ‘his coming from London’). The second type is...

Le but de cet article est d'analyser le statut de PE en roumain et A en espagnol quand ils sont notamment employés dans les constructions à arquage différentiel de l'objet. Pour ce faire, nous nous appuierons sur une comparaison avec leurs autres emplois possibles (c.-à-d. quand ils introduisent des GP lexicaux).

It is generally assumed that grammaticalization is a major process in linguistic change. It is also assumed that grammaticalization does not affect homogeneously all linguistic categories, or even all languages: it has been said, for instance, that some languages are further down most grammaticalization clines than others and, thus, appear to be mo...

Résumé. La saillance est un concept qui caractérise certains constituants ayant des propriétés (lexicales, sémantiques, morphosyntaxiques et / ou prosodiques) spécifiques dont le rôle premier est de les faire émerger sur le fond du contexte linguistique. Cet article se propose de décrire deux phénomènes de saillance linguistique déclenchés par le m...

Some recent linguistic studies have been based on a concept that has not been defined yet, to our knowledge, in Romanian linguistics. Namely, it is about the notion of saliency (cf. Fr. saillance < Engl. saliency). This term is rather new, even at international level. However, the phenomena it describes are not. It has been first in use in psycho-c...

La saillance est un concept qui caractérise certains constituants ayant des propriétés (lexicales, sémantiques, morphosyntaxiques et / ou prosodiques) spécifiques dont le rôle premier est de les faire émerger sur le fond du contexte linguistique. La première partie de cet article (publiée dans le numéro précédent) traite de trois phénomènes de sail...

In this paper, we analyze two types of nominal constructions in Romanian: DPs morphologically marked for Genitive and complex DE-phrases. The two types of construction are alike insofar as they involve a relation (which may either pertain to the lexical meaning of the head N or else be contextually triggered by the presence of the second argument),...

The status of the category P(reposition) has been the topic of several analyses in the last few decades. The goal of this presentation is to propose an analysis of prepositions in terms of semilexical features. Additionally, we shall take a closer look at the distinction between lexical and functional prepositions.

C'est un fait connu que les langues peuvent marquer de façon différentielle les constituants ayant des propriétés spécifiques (cf. Silverstein (1976), Bossong (1985, 1998), Aissen (2003)). Nous nous proposons d'analyser ici deux phénomènes de marquage différentiel en roumain (cf. Racoviţă (1940), Niculescu (1959, 1965), von Heusinger & Onea (2007))...

This paper is concerned with the semantics of the Romanian adverb mai in its occurrence as a VP-modifier. We propose that mai has the core meaning of an additive particle whose argument is a predicate of events. Following this monosemic analysis, we are able to explain the different interpretations of mai (its continuative, iterative and 'experient...

This article describes Differential Object Marking (DOM) in three Romance languages: Romanian, Spanish and Sardinian. Our goal is to examine the variation regarding this phenomenon in these three languages. Following Laca (1995), Dobrovie-Sorin (1997, 2002), Bleam (2004, 2005), Cornilescu & Dobrovie-Sorin (2007), we shall take a closer look to a ge...

Le but de cet article est de décrire et d'expliquer le comportement des prépositions afin d'aboutir à une définition formelle qui capte les propriétés de cette catégorie. En adoptant une approche comparative par rapport aux autres catégories, d'une part, et une perspective interlangues, d'autre part, nous proposons que les prépositions sont une cat...

The use of the preposition pe with the Direct Object (DO) in Romanian is an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), which is crosslinguisticaly a widespread phenomenon. This paper pursues one of our earlier works (see Mardale (2008)) and analyzes the distribution of DOM in Old Romanian with respect to the parameter's hierarchy proposed by Ai...

The goal of this paper is to discuss the following contrast: In Spanish, but not in Romanian, nor in Sardinian, differential object marking is possible with certain bare nouns. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 constitues the background for DOM analysis. In sections 2 and 4, we point out some aspects of the syntax-semantics of bare nouns...

The goal of this paper is to examine the alternation between nominal expressions marked with morphological case (e. g. fiul regelui "the king's son") and certain prepositional phrases (e. g. fiul de rege "the royal son") in Romanian. We will show that the two types of constructions are alike insofar as they involve a relation which may either perta...

It is well known that in certain Romance languages the direct object may be introduced or not by a marker which is homonymous with a corresponding preposition: pe in Romanian, a in Spanish and Sardinian. This phenomenon is known as Differential Object Marking (DOM). The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we present a detailed descriptio...

Ro-manian (section 2) and to give a brief overview of its previous syntactic analyses (section 3) ; ii To suggest a semantic analysis of mai as an additive particle in the event domain (section 4) ; iii To provide some evidence based on crosslinguistic comparison within Ro-mance languages (section 5). 2 The data 2.1 Distribution Romanian mai is a m...

Ce volume s’adresse aux chercheurs et aux étudiants de linguistique générale et comparée. Il privilégie la clarté conceptuelle, l’argumentation et les généralisations empiriques par rapport aux détails tech- niques des différents formalismes. Le livre poursuit deux objectifs : (i) définir la nature des prépositions en général et caractériser les pr...

Malgré une littérature abondante dédiée aux prépositions et, de façon plus générale, aux adpositions, le statut de ces dernières reste controversé. La plupart des études portant sur cette partie du discours la considèrent (i) soit comme un outil grammatical intervenant dans une structure ternaire - autrement dit, comme un instrument de la concaténa...

The aim of this paper is double. On the one hand, we present a descriptive overview of the use of the definite article with prepositions in Romanian. On the other hand, we provide a morpho-syntactic analysis of article 'drop' in the framework of minimalism. The paper is organised as follows. In section 2 we introduce the data to be discussed. We co...

In this paper, we analyze two types of nominal constructions in Romanian: DPs morphologically marked for Genitive and complex DE-phrases. The two types of construction are alike insofar as they involve a relation (which may either pertain to the lexical meaning of the head N or else be contextually triggered by the presence of the second argument),...

Nous présentons ici une typologie des systèmes prépositionnels des langues romanes, montrant dans quelle mesure elles ont utilisé des unités lexicales de même nature et organisées selon les mêmes catégories pour construire des systèmes linguistiques différents. Dans une première partie, nous proposerons une définition préliminaire de la préposition...

The goal of this paper is to discuss the following contrast: in Spanish, but not in Romanian, nor in Sardinian, differential object marking is possible with certain bare nouns. We derive this special behaviour of Spanish from its sensitivity to the so-called global parameters. Following Mardale, 2007, we also try to integrate the analysis of marked...

Dans cet article, nous aborderons un aspect concernant l'analyse des prépositions qui est souvent trop rapidement évoqué lorsqu'on examine ces unités de la langue. Il s'agit de la distinction entre prépositions dites " lexicales " et prépositions dites " fonctionnelles ". Nous montrerons que, si souvent cette distinction n'est pas facile à opérer,...