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Despite its importance in the analysis of gender in various research fields, Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity circulates in rather restricted academic spaces in Romania, as her gender studies is not yet a wide field of research. The importation and particularization of the discussion of gender as a social construct is influenced by various factors: from the persistent patriarchal structure of a society in which the post-communist legacy is still felt, to the simultaneity of theoretical receptions of works authored by Butler and several other types of feminist discourse, such as Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist approach. This paper analyses to what extent these theories produce effects in contemporary Romanian literature, especially in prose with queer issues at its core. The paper further examines the way in which the category of socially constructed gender can be used as a tool for analysing the configurations of the human subject as a sexualised Other in contemporary Romanian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A question in language acquisition research is whether attrition can affect L1 grammatical representation, and if so, under what conditions. This paper tests the Attrition via Acquisition (AvA) model, which takes a Feature Reassembly approach to predict how, in case on high degrees of similarity between the L1 and L2, the acquisition of L2 discourse-driven morpho-syntactic properties may affect L1 feature representations after a prolonged change in the speaker's primary linguistic input during adulthood. As a test case, we use the different features (specificity versus discourse anaphoricity) associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in Romanian and Italian, examining the grammars of Romanian first-generation immigrants with either L2 Italian or L2 English (a language without CLLD). Using a context-dependent Acceptability Judgment task and a Written Elicitation task we found evidence for L2-induced grammatical attrition, resulting in the addition of an L2 option without the loss of an L1 option, as predicted by the AvA. Attrition was found for participants who immigrated during adolescence or early adulthood and who are more likely to consider Italian their most proficient and most used language. We compare our findings on attrited L1 grammars to the results of a recent study reporting on near-native L2 Italian and L2 Romanian grammars by Romanian and Italian native speakers. Our findings contribute to an increasing body of literature showing that L1 attriters and L2 learners can end up with very similar grammars and confirm the importance of studying second language acquisition and L1 loss within a broader picture of bilingual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this article is to examine in detail an area of the grammar where standard Romanian, a Balkan Sprachbund language of the Romance phylum, and the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (here we used the dialect of Ragusa, in South-East Sicily) appear to converge, namely differential object marking (DOM). When needed, additional observations from non-Romance Balkan languages were also taken into account. Romanian and Ragusa use a prepositional strategy for differential marking, in a conjunctive system of semantic specifications, of which one is normally humanness/animacy. However, despite these unifying traits, this paper also focuses on important loci of divergence, some of which have generally been ignored in the previous literature. For example, Ragusa does not easily permit clitic doubling and shows differences in terms of binding possibilities and positions of direct objects, two traits that set it aside from both Romanian and non-Romance Balkan languages; additionally, as opposed to Romanian, its prepositional DOM strategy cannot override humanness/animacy. The comparative perspective we adopt allow us to obtain an in-depth picture of differential marking in the Balkan and Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at size nouns of the type grămadă 'heap / pile' in Romanian and classifies them into two categories: size nouns with a comparative interpretation (Doetjes and Rooryck 2003) and size nouns with a quantifying interpretation (Brems 2007; 2010), the latter reading being sometimes contextually extended to a third type of interpretation, the negative evaluation interpretation (Brems 2010). The two major types of readings that size nouns may have are read off a head-complement syntactic structure, typical for pseudopartitive constructions, which size nouns+de+N constitute a subcategory of (Tănase-Dogaru 2017). The comparative interpretation arises as a reflex of the semi-lexicality of the size noun, while the quantifying interpretation is a reflex of the size noun having lost its original lexical meaning, and therefore serving a functional role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline the meaning, the role and the limits of the principle of legality according to the Romanian legal system. Firstly, a few preliminary questions regarding the nature and the role of legal principles in general have to be answered. This is necessary in order to provide a reader which is not familiarized with this national set of norms with a general understanding of the concepts used during the analysis of the proposed topic. Having achieved this, one may subsequently proceed to analysing the general understanding of the principle of legality and its main coordinates in the Romanian legal system. One would have to remember that the latter is a European continental (or civil) legal system, belonging to a country which is a member of the European Union, of the United Nations and of the Council of Europe. This translates into the fact that the paper does also have to analyse the impact of the international public law on the way the principle of legality is currently comprehended and applied internally. All these being said, the third and main section of the paper concentrates on how is this concept applied in a few of the legal domains. The paper is mainly interested in the public implications of the principle; therefore, the analysis will try to discover the main ways in which the rule of law culture shapes the notion of public power and its exercise. The paper will end with a few final considerations regarding the main ideas discovered during the previous sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates some idiomatic expressions related to the animal world, discussing their possible correspondences in three languages: English, Italian and Romanian. Similarities can be based on common biblical, literary and/or mythological origins, as well as on similar forms of life (e.g. peasant life). There may be variations on the topic, or expressions which are very distant from each other, in such a way that a translator is required to make a considerable effort of creativity to restore the original image.Starting from a series of animal idioms in the three languages mentioned above, we try to detect in which cases idioms have maintained equivalent zoomorphic images (the same animal or a similar one in terms of taxonomy or behaviour) or have used other images related to the natural world, or even in which cases idioms have moved away from this world, thus showing a possible detachment from the peasant culture which generated some of these expressions. The paper ends with a brief exploration of the phraseological bestiary in some non-Indo-European languages. This is to verify whether the Indo-European languages under discussion and in particular two neo-Latin languages, namely Italian and Romanian, show greater affinities in animal idioms than those possible with other linguistic families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to model derivational networks (nests) of emotive verbs in Romanian, on the basis of the semantic-structural types of derivatives. First, we define the most important notions of the nest derivatology, we introduce the notion of derivational nest modelling and of semantic-structural types of derivatives, and describe the principles of the analysis. After that, the derivational nests of selected verbs and their formal-semantic analysis are presented, with semantic and formal aspects in the commentary after each nest. At the end, the matrix of models resulting from the juxtaposition of all nest models and the conclusions from the research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the control/raising behaviour of Romanian aspectual verbs. Following Mourounas & Williamson's (2019) proposal for English aspectuals, I show that in Romanian these verbs enter the causative alternation, a property which distinguishes them from both raising and control verbs and which can explain their hybrid behaviour. The aspectual verbs which merge with an infinitive and a subjunctive complement evince raising-like behaviour in their anticausative variant and control-like behaviour in their causative variant. Their anticausative variant is not marked and the verb does not project any Voice Phrase. In their causative variant, they project a thematic Voice Phrase which hosts an external argument, assigned an Agent-Initiator theta-role. Some of the verbs in the termina 'finish' class have a marked anticausative variant which projects an expletive Voice Phrase (Schäfer 2008) which hosts the voice marker se whose presence signals the existence of a volitional, external argument in the structure. When these verbs occur with a supine complement they can only have an unmarked form, indicative of causative status, and they behave exclusively like verbs of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, the author analyses the translation of the French preposition à into Finnish and Romanian. In a multifaceted approach, translating a preposition involves understanding its various meanings and nuances across different languages and cultural contexts. The analysis of the translation of the preposition à into these languages allows finding equivalences that take into account cultural differences and avoiding literal translations that might seem strange or inappropriate. The preposition à can have several meanings and uses in French, such as indicating direction, time, place, etc. Understanding how these nuances are rendered into Finnish and Romanian helps to avoid translation errors and convey the precise meaning of the source text. The author gives examples from the books Courrier de Finlande written by Philippe Guicheteau and Le Village de l'Allemand ou Le Journal des frères Schiller written by Boualem Sansal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos is the property of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The current paper analyzes Romanian predicate doubling, a construction that features topicalization of a non-finite form, a supine, that surfaces either as a bare verb or as a vP complete with arguments and adjuncts and is immediately followed by a clausal structure whose fully inflected tensed verb is the lexical copy of the supine. Predicate doubling occurs in a large variety of languages and has been used in syntactic research to support various theoretical accounts such the multiple copy theory of movement developed in Nunes (2004) or late adjunction of the arguments of the fronted predicate (Landau 2007), to name just a few. I argue for a base generation account of Romanian predicate doubling, drawing upon the framework implemented in Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022). This framework takes into consideration information structure and the way in which discourse develops by answering relevant questions under discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Rasprave Instituta za Hrvatski Jezik i Jezikoslovlje is the property of Institute of Croatian Language & Linguistics / Institut za Hrvatski Jezik i Jezikoslovlje and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Modal verbs expressing epistemic and deontic modality can be used as discourse markers to implicate the authors' attitude to the propositional content (doubt, certainty, hedging). Based on English modality framework, this paper discusses the uses of modals in expressing author's attitude in Romanian and Serbian scientific discourse (social sciences and humanities) and compares these uses in the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this study, we discuss the status and features of the words of Japanese origin in Romanian, based on Romanian dictionaries of neologisms and recent words. Several studies on different types of dictionaries of European languages show that, in recent decades, most borrowings into Western languages from a language outside the Western cultural space come from Japanese. A careful analysis demonstrates that this tendency can be also identified in the recent lexical dynamics of the Romanian language. First, we outline the context and objectives of the paper and discuss some terminological issues. This is followed by a short historical background and a presentation of the Romanian dictionaries used to collect the corpus. Quantitative information is provided regarding the data from each dictionary. Finally, we proceed to a qualitative analysis of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential object marking (DOM) interacts with nominal structure in complex ways across Romance languages. For example, in Spanish, it has been claimed to ban bare nominals. For Romanian, in turn, two main restrictions have been discussed: (i) ban on overt definiteness on unmodified nominals; and (ii) ban on bare nominals, if the structure contains an overt modification. This paper has two main goals. First, it examines some contexts where these types of restrictions can be lifted for some speakers; such contexts allow us to grasp a better understanding of the limits of variation permitted by DOM in its interaction with nominal structure and determiner systems. Secondly, it proposes that a theory under which DOM signals a licensing strategy beyond Case can derive the variation patterns observed in the data. Subsequently, various parameters are examined, which encode (i) how specifications responsible for DOM interact with other features in the composition of nominals; and (ii) how the resulting complex containing DOM as well as other features is resolved at PF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes an answer to the question of how a language of (strict) negative concord may evince double negation reading in negative clauses with N-words. The question is justified, because according to Giannakidou (2006), languages of strict negative concord cannot express double negation. Romanian is a language of strict negative concord and no consensus exists among researchers, as far as the double negation reading of negative clauses with N-words is concerned. For this reason, we designed and conducted an experiment which shows that double negation is an interpretive option in negative clauses with N-words, even if it is not recognised by all the native speakers. Our experiment also reveals that speakers' interpretive options with respect to this topic are very diverse. In order to account for them, we propose a theory that explains the duality negative concord/double negation. The theory consists of a number of rules which pairs the prosody of the N-words with their meaning and use. The theory relies on two theses: (i) N-words in Romanian are universal quantifiers sensitive to negation and scoping above it; (ii) emphatic accent on N-words in Romanian marks either the wide scope of the N-words with respect to negation, or the speaker's verum attitude (Hohle 1992) towards the interlocutor's utterances. In the literature, the verum attitude is called Verum Focus. When emphasis expresses verum focus, it means agreement or disagreement of the speaker with the truth of the utterance held by the interlocutor. Disagreement amounts to rejecting the truth commitment. If the interlocutor's utterance is negative and contains N-words, rejecting the truth commitment is asserting its opposite. This yields the double negation effect. In the final section we compare our approach to other solutions already proposed in the literature, and prospect the chances of extending it to other negative concord languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper provides a series of examples of common translation mistakes that are the result of source language interference. The issue of crosslinguistic interference, and its impact upon translation is a useful aspect to consider if one wishes to significantly improve translation results and create texts which stay true to the target language structure. Comparing the grammatical structure of the source and target languages of a text becomes a tool for predicting possible mistakes rooted in source language transfer to the target language of a text. Initially, comparative-contrastive analyses were performed primarily in the field of language teaching and acquisition, but recently the method has started being applied also in the field of Translation Studies. The comparative analysis of specific language structures can thus come in handy for both the study of translation and for translator training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aspectualizers as verbs indicating phases in the development of events are typically divided into ingressive (denoting beginning), continuative (denoting continuation) and egressive (denoting ending). These verbs require specific complementation with the lexical verbs which are paired with the aspectualizers. Their analysis starts from the features of such complementation in English (subordinate non-finite infinitival and participial clauses) and compares them with the features of their Romanian translation equivalents. This corpus-based research (with the examples from modern British novels) focuses on the structural characteristics of the complementation in the two languages, lexical aspect of the verbs in the complementation (activities, states, accomplishments, achievements), as well as similarities and differences between the two languages in that respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orientation of phraseological nomination towards the human allows the reflection of everyday collective observations, experiences and evaluations of a certain (norm-deviating) behaviour or action. The paper explores the role of the linguistic image in the metaphorisation of the concept ‘Wahnsinn’/‘Verrücktheit’ in German and Romanian, in order to ask about the productive initial domains for the conceptualisation of this term, since conceptual spheres allow conclusions to be drawn about the models of thought and values anchored in the language. The interlingual analysis of this particular excerpt from the German and Romanian lexicon of phrases makes it clear that one cannot speak of serious differences in the phraseological realisation or of differing valuations and that universal and productive metaphorical patterns can be discerned in the conceptualisation of ‘Wahnsinn’/‘Verrücktheit’ in German and in Romanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit causality is the property of interpersonal verbs to relate two human or animate entities in such a way that one of the referents is assumed to have caused the action or attitude described by the verb. This assumption, which has been termed bias and which is seemingly rooted in the argument structure of verbs, affects remention and subsequent pronominalization. This paper surveys theoretical and psycholinguistic approaches to causality in language with a focus on implicit causal relations expressed inter-clausally by verbs. It also presents the preliminary results of an off-line sentence-continuation study in which we tested the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural consistency of the implicit causality bias patterns of interpersonal verbs in Romanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Citaliste: The Scientific Journal on Theory & Practice of Librarianship is the property of Citaliste: The Scientific Journal on Theory & Practice of Librarianship and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Large-scale pre-trained language representation and its promising performance in various downstream applications have become an area of interest in the field of natural language processing (NLP). There has been huge interest in further increasing the model's size in order to outperform the best previously obtained performances. However, at some point, increasing the model's parameters may lead to reaching its saturation point due to the limited capacity of GPU/TPU. In addition to this, such models are mostly available in English or a shared multilingual structure. Hence, in this paper, we propose a lite BERT trained on a large corpus solely in the Romanian language, which we called "A Lite Romanian BERT (ALR-BERT)". Based on comprehensive empirical results, ALR-BERT produces models that scale far better than the original Romanian BERT. Alongside presenting the performance on downstream tasks, we detail the analysis of the training process and its parameters. We also intend to distribute our code and model as an open source together with the downstream task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An outstanding question in current studies concerns the status of Romance SE that does not obviously mark reflexivity or anticausativity. This paper signals the presence of such constructions in Old and Modern Romanian, where SE occurs with unergative verbs and qualifies as pleonastic according to traditional grammars (i.e., it makes no difference for the truth conditions or for the argument structure). The main argument is that such constructions are actually instances of differential subject marking (DSM) in Romanian, and that the semantic triggers and the underlying configuration resemble those that occur with differential object marking (DOM) in this language. In terms of theoretical contribution, this analysis (i) widens the cross-linguistic inventory of DSM patterns, by adding Clitic Doubling; (ii) confirms the predictions of recent studies that there could be similarity rather than opposition between DOM and DSM contexts; (iii) shows the possibility of re-allocating the reflexive pronoun SE to other configurations besides (an instance of) verb reflexivization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Differential object marking (DOM) has been shown, in an impressive number of production studies, to be acquired by monolingual children at around age 3. The picture which emerges from comprehension data, however, reveals that DOM is an area of vulnerability in L1 acquisition. This study investigates the acquisition of DOM by monolingual Romanian children using a preference judgment task. 80 monolingual Romanian children (aged 4;04-11;04) and a control group of 10 Romanian adults took part in the study. Results show that DOM is vulnerable and trace this vulnerability to the animacy feature. Romanian children incorrectly overgeneralize DOM to inanimate proper names and inanimate descriptive DPs until age 9. The vulnerability of animacy is predicted by its variable behaviour with respect to object marking as well as by the current increase in the use of clitic doubling, a DOM marker less sensitive to animacy. On the learnability side, we account for the findings in terms of Biberauer & Roberts' (2015, 2017) Maximize Minimal Means model. We suggest that, in accordance with the Feature Economy bias, Romanian children first identify only the role of referential stability (which has more robust cues in the input) and consider the possibility of animacy as a relevant feature later. In line with the Input Generalization bias, children maximize the role of referential stability which results in overgeneralization of DOM to inanimate objects, especially to inanimate proper names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the principles of writing the Romanian language in relation with the new orthographic dictionary. Phonetic, morphological, syntactical and etymological aspects led to the establishment of a system of rules in the Romanian writing language that can be easily learned and applied. Last year appeared the third edition of the orthographic dictionary regulating current writing. The Orthographic, Orthoepic and Morphological Dictionary of the Romanian Language (DOOM) adapts the writing of Romanian to current requirements, even if some double variants and also linguistic uncertainties are still present. The frequency of errors in today‘s press shows that publishers and journalists show a lack of professionalism, promoting media products of questionable quality, as well as the lack of trust in such valid tools that can improve correct writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope of the contribution is to raise intercultural awareness and understanding in the context of globalisation. Readers will come across words familiar to them, which they have never thought of as belonging to the Ukrainian vocabulary. These are English / Romanian words of Ukrainian origin, i.e. words in the English / Romanian language that have been borrowed from the Ukrainian language at some point in time and under different circumstances. The authors have identified a corpus of 42 such Ukrainian borrowings (most of which are used in tourism mass media) based on English / Romanian language dictionaries and Internet sources, and analysed them from a linguistic perspective in an attempt to explain how and why they have entered the English / Romanian language. Research results show that Ukrainian borrowings are circumscribed to such fields as cuisine, ethnicity, geography, history, music, or politics. Some of them have entered English / Romanian directly, some others via other languages; other borrowings have originated in other languages, but they refer to Ukrainian realities (past and present); finally, some Ukrainian borrowings are used by Ukrainian diaspora in an English / Romanian-speaking environment.

English phrasal verbs represent a specific phrasal lexeme which typically cannot be transferred directly to other languages. In addition, phrasal verbs cover a variety of meanings, from literal to idiomatic, which also presents a problem for translation. The proposed research analyzes the translation options in Romanian and Serbian, pointing to the similarities and differences between the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to classify Romanian dialects from a prosodic point of view within the European Romance-speaking area. The data is part of the Multimedia Atlas of Romance Prosody - AMPER (Contini, 1992) and is analysed dialectometrically by means of ProDis (Elvira-García et al., 2015; Fernández Planas, 2016). The database includes more than 17,000 utterances produced by 48 speakers from 26 survey sites of 15 varieties of 6 Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Friulian and Romanian). The results show that the two main prosodic areas of Romanian (see Roseano, 2016b) remain separate when they are dialectometrized with data from other Romance languages. In addition, if one analyses questions and statements separately, it can be seen that questions allow us to distinguish geoprosodic areas more effectively than statements do (as suggested by previous studies such as Fernández Planas et al., 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first dialectometric analysis of intonational variation of standard spoken Romanian. The data analysed (26,680 sentences) were gathered within the AMPER-ROM project and the dialectometrical analysis has been carried out with ProDis. The results are consistent with the geolinguistic descriptions of Romanian varieties. ProDis identified two major areas for yes-no questions: a central-eastern one (Moldo-Walachian), with rising contours, and a central-western one (Transylvanian, discontinuously continuing over Bukovina to Bessarabia--the Republic of Moldova--), which presents also falling contours. The study suggests that intonational areas are somehow more conservative of and (relatively) independent from segmental dialectal areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on an analysis of the intonation patterns of different types of vocatives in Romanian language. We present the main characteristics of the tonal patterns observed in the vocative constructions instances of isolated vocatives and contexts in which vocatives occur in different positions: initial, middle, and final. Our analysis, in the framework of AM phonology with ToBI conventions, reveals that most of isolated vocatives are realized as LsH*(!)H% (vocative chant), and L+H* L% (insistent call). For non-isolated vocatives the most frequent contours are labeled as L+H* L% and H+L* L%. Cross-linguistically, our findings show that Romanian vocatives display the same pattern as other Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined strong, full or tonal, and those that can not, coined weak, clitic, or atonal. However, in the last decades, research on this topic showed that items generally labeled as clitics are by far more complex. Between words and affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description and modeling. As for Romanian, the debate on weak (i.e., clitic) pronouns was dominated by the question about their categorial status: are these items clitics or affixes? In this article, we present and scrutinize different approaches that support the claim that there is a difference between proclitics and enclitics, i.e., between clitics occurring before vs. after the verb. Since Romanian features a full-fledged pronominal system with different deficiency degrees, we evaluate these claims against it. We show that all these approaches manifest basic deficiencies.

The so-called "Moldavian language", invented by the Soviets in the 1920s, was just another instrument for the Soviet effort trying to assimilate people and to erase national identities, in order to make room for the "Soviet identity". The Gulags, the massacres, the deportations and assassinations were not enough to "convince" people to embrace the new Soviet identity, the Soviet Communists needed pseudo-science as well. But the so-called "Moldavian language" was more than just another Soviet social engineering, it was an integrate part of a geopolitical strategy aimed at dismembering Romania and at conquering more of Central and South-Eastern Europe. This explicit anti-Romanian and geopolitical objective was written down by the Soviets in the very birth certificate of the "Moldavian language" in 1924, and it was copied by Serbian authorities after WW2, trying to invent a "Vlach language" for the Romanian minority in Serbia. Neither Russia, nor Serbia have yet abandoned these efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A question in language acquisition research is whether attrition can affect L1 grammatical representation, and if so, under what conditions. This paper tests the Attrition via Acquisition (AvA) model, which takes a Feature Reassembly approach to predict how, in case on high degrees of similarity between the L1 and L2, the acquisition of L2 discourse-driven morpho-syntactic properties may affect L1 feature representations after a prolonged change in the speaker’s primary linguistic input during adulthood. As a test case, we use the different features (specificity versus discourse anaphoricity) associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in Romanian and Italian, examining the grammars of Romanian first-generation immigrants with either L2 Italian or L2 English (a language without CLLD). Using a context-dependent Acceptability Judgment task and a Written Elicitation task we found evidence for L2-induced grammatical attrition, resulting in the addition of an L2 option without the loss of an L1 option, as predicted by the AvA. Attrition was found for participants who immigrated during adolescence or early adulthood and who are more likely to consider Italian their most proficient and most used language. We compare our findings on attrited L1 grammars to the results of a recent study reporting on near-native L2 Italian and L2 Romanian grammars by Romanian and Italian native speakers. Our findings contribute to an increasing body of literature showing that L1 attriters and L2 learners can end up with very similar grammars and confirm the importance of studying second language acquisition and L1 loss within a broader picture of bilingual development.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The connection between language contact and the bilingual speaker goes back to foundational authors in the field of contact linguistics. Yet there is very little work that combines these two levels in a single study. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to language contact by testing the role of cross-language priming (CLP) on contact-induced change at the level of complex noun phrases (NPs). Design/methodology/approach: We conducted three studies with different types of data. In Study 1, we analyse the Romani Morpho-Syntax database to identify word order preferences in Romani dialects from different countries. In Study 2, we examine a corpus of interviews in Romani from Romania. In Study 3, we conduct an experiment to test short-term priming in adjective (ADJ)/noun (N) order from Romanian to Romani and within Romani. Data and analysis: In Study 1, we examine the word order in approximately 3000 NPs from 119 Romani speakers. In Study 2, we analyse a speech corpus of 9400 words from four elderly Romani–Romanian bilinguals. In Study 3, 90 Romani–Romanian bilinguals participated in a priming experiment. We used multinomial mixed-effects logistic regression, Bayesian models and Random Forests to analyse the experimental results. Findings/conclusions: Study 1 shows that Romani speakers from Romania stand out for their frequent use of postnominal ADJs. Study 2 confirms these uses in free speech. Study 3 reveals significant CLP effects, whereby speakers favour the use of determiner (DET)–N–ADJ order in Romani immediately following a noun with a suffixed determiner (NDET)–ADJ sentence read in Romanian. Originality: Our study is the first to demonstrate CLP effects in ADJ/N order. Significance/implications: We illustrate a unified approach to language contact by introducing theoretical and methodological advances from the field of bilingualism into the study of contact-induced change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanian and Bulgarian languages share common features stemming from the Balkan linguistic aria. Among the distinctive grammatical constructions in Balkan languages is the new-type analytic subjunctive, a replacement for the infinitive in various languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Greek. The subjunctive can manifest in present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses in most languages. However, Romanian has more limited combinations, employing only the present and perfect tenses. Despite these differences, the subjunctive shares structural, semantic, and usage similarities across Balkan languages. The use of the subjunctive in optative sentences is a common feature in Balkan languages, conveying achievable desires in the present and strong but unrealizable wishes in the past. This paper aims to broaden the research on the Balkan-type subjunctive by illustrating parallels in the modal values of this mood in Romanian and Bulgarian in independent optative sentences. The research underscores numerous correspondences in the use of the subjunctive in optative sentences in Romanian and Bulgarian. In both languages, within the optative context, the subjunctive expresses various sentiments such as desire, wishes, regret, protest, and indignation. The expression of both factual and counterfactual desires using present and past subjunctive forms is also similar in both languages. The present forms of the subjunctive express a factual desire, meaning an achievable wish that could be fulfilled in the future. The present subjunctive forms are very often encountered in idiomatic expressions that convey wishes and imprecations. Many similarities are noted between expressions in the two languages, both in terms of structure and in semantics and lexical means. The use of present subjunctive forms is not typical for expressing counterfactual wishes (unrealizable or difficult to achieve) but occurs in specific contexts. Wishes expressed through past subjunctive forms are counterfactual because the circumstances in which they could have been realized are omitted. Such statements convey the speaker's regret regarding an unfulfilled desire. In Romanian grammar, detailed treatment of the uses of the perfect subjunctive is lacking, but it is noted to have optative value. In Bulgarian, counterfactual wishes are expressed using three past tenses of the subjunctive – pluperfect, imperfect, and perfect. In this regard, the capabilities of the perfect subjunctive in Romanian stand out for expressing multiple meanings. With the exception of some meanings of the imperfect subjunctive in Bulgarian, the perfect subjunctive in Romanian can convey nearly all the meanings of the three past tenses in Bulgarian. The study highlights numerous similarities in the use of the subjunctive in Romanian and Bulgarian in optative sentences, offering observations that contribute to a deeper understanding of this mood within the field of Romanian, Bulgarian, and Balkan linguistics.

In this article, I address the evolution of the competition between two Latin patterns, habeo and mihi est, in Romanian. As opposed to the other Romance languages, which replace the mihi est pattern with habeo in possessor and experiencer contexts, Romanian maintains both Latin patterns. The general evolution of these patterns in the Romance languages is well known, however, a detailed usage-based account is currently lacking. Building on the theoretical findings on the role of functional competition in linguistic change, the rivalry between the two patterns in Romanian has already been argued to have settled in terms of differentiation, with each of the two forms specializing in different functional domains by Vangaever and Ilioaia in 2021 in their study "Specialisation through competition: habeo vs. mihi est from Latin to Romanian". With this idea as a starting point, I investigate, by means of a diachronic corpus study, whether the dynamics in the inventory of state nouns occurring in these constructions can affect their evolution and productivity. The preliminary results show that this is indeed the case. Concomitantly, I explore whether the historical changes that the two patterns have undergone over the centuries can be described in terms of grammaticalization, constructionalization, or in terms of constructional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews some of the principal patterns of morphosyntactic variation within Daco-Romanian and across Daco-Romance in support of a distinction between low vs high V-movement grammars variously distributed in accordance with diatopic variation (Daco-Romance: west vs east, Aromanian: north vs south), diachronic and diagenerational variation (Megleno-Romanian) and endogenous vs exogenous factors (Istro-Romanian). This approach, which builds on the insights of the Borer–Chomsky conjecture, assumes that the locus of parametric variation lies in the lexicon and the (PF-)lexicalization of specific formal feature values of individual functional projections, in our case the clausal heads T and v and the broad cartographic areas that they can be taken to represent. In this way, our analysis locates the relevant dimensions of (micro)variation among different Daco-Romance varieties in properties of T and v. In particular, we show that the feature values of these two heads are not set in isolation, inasmuch as parameters form an interrelated network of implicational relationships: the given value of a particular parameter entails the concomitant activation of associated lower-order parametric choices, whose potential surface effects may consequently become entirely predictable, or indeed render other parameters entirely irrelevant. In this way we can derive properties such as verb–adverb order, auxiliary selection, retention vs loss of the preterite, the availability of a dedicated preverbal subject position, the distribution of DOM, and the different stages of Jespersen's Cycle across Daco-Romance quite transparently, based on the relevant strength of T and v in individual sub-branches and sub-dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorin Uritescu's collaboration with the authors has produced the Romanian Online Dialect Atlas (RODA) and many other studies in phonology and dialectology. Here we recap some of this work, and introduce a new, subsequent study on the use of "Character Profiles" for measuring dialect differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we account for different patterns found in complement clauses of se constructions in Romanian and Spanish. In Romanian, a se construction cannot host an infinitival complement, an apparently controlled clause, whereas in Spanish a se construction can. However, when an additional se is added to the complement clause (a “double se construction”), the Romanian structure becomes grammatical, while the Spanish equivalent becomes ungrammatical. The Romanian patterns have been previously argued in Giurgea & Cotfas (2021) to be cases of control, with a failed agreement relation forcing the obligatory presence of se in the complement. We propose an alternative based on two major differences found in Romanian and Spanish. First, in se constructions, Spec, Voice is saturated by the external argument in Spanish, but it is unsaturated in Romanian. We argue that this prevents the external argument in Romanian from acting as a controller. Second, Romanian infinitival clauses appear to share properties with finite clauses, in contrast to Spanish. We argue that the grammatical Romanian double se construction is not an instance of control and suggest that it is the finite nature of the infinitival complement that allows for a double se construction.

The main goal of this article is to examine in detail an area of the grammar where standard Romanian, a Balkan Sprachbund language of the Romance phylum, and the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (here we used the dialect of Ragusa, in South-East Sicily) appear to converge, namely differential object marking (DOM). When needed, additional observations from non-Romance Balkan languages were also taken into account. Romanian and Ragusa use a prepositional strategy for differential marking, in a conjunctive system of semantic specifications, of which one is normally humanness/animacy. However, despite these unifying traits, this paper also focuses on important loci of divergence, some of which have generally been ignored in the previous literature. For example, Ragusa does not easily permit clitic doubling and shows differences in terms of binding possibilities and positions of direct objects, two traits that set it aside from both Romanian and non-Romance Balkan languages; additionally, as opposed to Romanian, its prepositional DOM strategy cannot override humanness/animacy. The comparative perspective we adopt allow us to obtain an in-depth picture of differential marking in the Balkan and Romance languages.

Cartoons are designed as a response to a social event and aim to create a humorous effect in the audience through their multimodal discourse. The interpretation requires contextual and cultural information which has to be shared by the cartoonist and the audience. Our research focuses on the dialogue of humorous cartoons between the West and the East. From a dialogic perspective, the action, i.e., the cartoons published in the French and Swiss media, generates a reaction in the Romanian media. We discuss the transfer of national stereotypes at a European level and show that, although the cartoons target a particular out-group, they ricochet to another group. Thus, new boundaries are set up and humour functions as a divisive social activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]