The MIHI EST Construction : An Instance of Non-Canonical Subject Marking in Romanian.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Ilioaia, Mihaela.

Series:

Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie Series

Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie Series ; v.481

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (356 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin/Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2023.

Summary:

This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear 'I am hungry/ afraid'). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction's psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgements

Contents

List of abbreviations

List of tables

List of figures

Chapter 1 Romanian between Romance and South-East European languages

Chapter 2 The object of the study

Part 1: The mihi est construction

Chapter 3 The mihi est construction as a complex-predicate construction

Chapter 4 Corpus and methodology

Chapter 5 Nouns entering the mihi est construction

Part 2: The subject and its properties

Chapter 6 The subject: Toward a universal definition

Chapter 7 Subject properties in Romanian

Chapter 8 Identifying the subject of the mihi est construction

Part 3: Expansion of the non-canonical pattern

Chapter 9 Productivity of the mihi est construction

Chapter 10 Summary and conclusions

Bibliography

Appendices

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Index of subjects

Index of names

Notes:

Diss. Ghent University 2021.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9783111055466

3111055469

OCLC:

1414455855