Article Drop and Case Marking in Romanian

• Ion Giurgea ^[1]
  1. [1] Institute of Linguistics

     Institute of Linguistics

     Rusia

     
• Localización: Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, ISSN-e 2385-4138, Vol. 10, Vol. 2, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: RLLT21, Selected papers from LSRL 52, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In Romanian, the definite article cannot be overtly realized if the maximal nominal projection contains only the lexical N and occurs in the complement position of (most) accusative-taking prepositions. Arguing that a definite D is present in the underlying syntactic representation, I describe article drop as a PF-phenomenon. I follow Dobrovie-Sorin’s (2007) idea that article drop is conditioned by a complex head formation operation that assigns a X0-status to DPs of the form [D+def N0], but I  show that her proposal of extending complex head formation to P is contradicted by the behavior of article drop in coordination. Therefore, I propose a different explanation for the limitation of article drop to the complement of P: based on the fact that article drop also occurs with prepositional case markers (which are K heads rather than Ps), I propose that article drop only occurs when D lacks Case. Underlying this analysis is a novel theory of case marking in Romanian: I propose that inflectional marking involves null Ks that trigger spreading of a Case feature to their complement (following Norris 2014, 2018), whereas prepositional marking involves an overt K and no feature spreading. Prepositions that trigger article drop are assimilated to K heads in that they take a DP, rather than a KP, complement, playing K’s role of closing-off the nominal extended projection.