ON THE USE OF THE DEFINITE ARTICLE WITH PREPOSITIONS IN ROMANIAN

Alexandru Mardale (1)

1 SeDyL - Structure et Dynamique des Langues

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 compare Romanian examples to other Romance languages, Albanian and English. We also register a few exceptions to the empirical generalization we shall observe. Section 3 is concerned with a brief examination of other cases of article omission representing a different phenomenon. In section 4 we discuss the conditions under which article drop takes place in Romanian. In this section we show that there are a number of necessary but not sufficient conditions being in a competing relation with respect to article drop. Section 5 offers an analysis of this phenomenon in terms of economy and reduced functional structure. Finally, section 6 provides the conclusions of our research.

Mots clés: Definite Article; Suffixal; Modification; Incorporation; M-Merger

Domaines: Linguistique

Alexandru Mardale. ON THE USE OF THE DEFINITE ARTICLE WITH PREPOSITIONS IN ROMANIAN. 2006. ⟨halshs-00556191⟩