ON THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN INFLECTIONAL CASE AND PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES IN ROMANIAN

Alexandru Mardale (1)

1 SeDyL - Structure et Dynamique des Langues

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 pertain to the lexical meaning of the head N or else be contextually triggered by the presence of the second argument. We will also observe that they differ regarding the nature of the second argument: a strong correlation can be shown to exist between syntactic categories (DPs vs. NPs), Case marking (morphological vs. prepositional) and semantic type (individuals vs. properties).

Mots clés: Case; (Functional) Preposition; morphological constraint; Entity; Property

Domaines: Linguistique

Alexandru Mardale. ON THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN INFLECTIONAL CASE AND PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES IN ROMANIAN. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2008, X (1), pp.147-159. ⟨halshs-00556189⟩