ANALELE UNIVERSITĂŢII BUCUREŞTI LIMBI ŞI LITERATURI STRĂINE 2016 – Nr. 1 SUMAR • SOMMAIRE • CONTENTS LINGVISTIC Ă / LINGUISTIQUE / LINGUISTICS ELENA L ĂCĂTU Ş, Romanian Aspectual Verbs: Control and Restructuring ............... 3 COSTIN-VALENTIN OANCEA, The Category of Number in Present-Day English(es): Variation and Context ............................................................................................ 25 LEAH NACHMANI, EFL Teachers’ Perspectives on Reading Acquisition within a Multi-Cultural Learning Environment .................................................................. 41 ANDREI A. AVRAM, Diagnostic Features of English Pidgins/Creoles: New Evidence from West African Pidgin English and Krio ........................................................ 55 MIHAI CRUDU, Zum Lexem Herr und zu dessen Auftauchen in Wortbildungen und Phrasemen ............................................................................................................... 79 CAMELIA M ĂDĂLINA ŞTEFAN, On Latin-Old Swedish Language Contact through Loanwords ............................................................................................................... 89 * Recenzii • Comptes rendus • Reviews .................................................................................. 105 Contributors ........................................................................................................................ 111 ROMANIAN ASPECTUAL VERBS: CONTROL AND RESTRUCTURING ELENA L ĂCĂTU Ş* Abstract The aim of the present paper is to investigate the behaviour of those Romanian aspectual verbs which denote the end of an activity and which select a supine complement. I focus on whether they evince control and/or raising behaviour and on whether they induce restructuring effects. The results show that these verbs behave like bona fide verbs of control and trigger restructuring. But they do not induce the same degree of restructuring. A brief comparison with the behaviour of the same aspectual verbs and a subjunctive complement reveals that the transparency of clausal boundaries is determined in the derivation, being directly dependent on the structural properties of the complement with which the aspectual verb merges. One further result of the analysis is that these verbs are dual mood choice verbs. They select the supine when the complement denotes an agentive durative process, and the subjunctive when they extend their range of complements to those which are, in principle, incompatible with their inherent agentive resultative value. Keywords: aspectual verb, Romanian, control, restructuring, dual mood choice. 1. Introduction Aspectual verbs “describe the initiation, termination, or continuation of an activity” (Levin 1993: 274). In the literature, one can identify two main lines of investigation with respect to their control/raising behaviour. According to one line, they have been argued to have hybrid behaviour, evincing both properties of control and of raising verbs (Perlmutter 1968, 1970, Davies & Dubinsky 2004). Other studies show that aspectual verbs behave uniformly as raising verbs (see, for example, Rochette 1999). With respect to type of control configuration, aspectual verbs have been analysed as verbs of exhaustive control (Landau 2000). Several previous studies showed that exhaustive control verbs induce restructuring effects (Wurmbrand * University of Bucharest, [email protected]. 4 ELENA L ĂCĂTU Ş 1998, Cinque 2006) 1. According to this point of view, aspectual verbs, which are verbs of exhaustive control, should induce restructuring effects. Grano (2015) shows that this correlation is attested across languages; verbs of exhaustive control enter monoclausal structures, within which they realize a functional head. Romanian has aspectual verbs which denote the beginning ( a începe, a da , a se apuca ‘begin, start’), the continuation (a continua ‘continue’), and the end of a state of affairs ( a înceta, a conteni,a ispr ăvi,a sfîr şi, a termina ‘stop, cease, end, finish’) (Gu ţu Romalo 1961/2013, Manea & al. 2008). They take both finite and non-finite complements, i.e. they can take complements of various sizes. The pattern of complementation may differ from one semantic class to the other, as well as within one and the same class. For example, aspectual verbs which denote the beginning of a state of affairs take mainly subjunctive complements (1), whereas those that denote the end of a situation prefer the supine (2). The verbs in the former class can also take (more rarely) an infinitive (3) and some of the verbs in the latter class may also marginally take a subjunctive (4) or an infinitive (5) as their complement. (1) Vasile a început să scrie o carte. Vasile has begun SĂ write a book ‘Vasile has begun to write a book.’ (2) Vasile a terminat de scris o carte. Vasile has finished DE write-SUP a book ‘Vasile finished writing a book.’ (3) Vasile a început a scrie o carte. Vasile has begun INF write a book ‘Vasile started writing a book.’ (4) Vasile a încetat să mai vin ă pe la noi. Vasile has ceased SĂ more come at us ‘Vasile ceased to visit us.’ (5) Vasile a contenit a cânta. Vasile has stopped INF sing ‘Vasile stopped singing.’ The empirical data in (1)-(5) indicate that aspectual verbs in Romanian might not represent a syntactic homogeneous class. However, previous studies which focused on their control/raising properties adopted a unifying analysis. Alboiu (2007), following Hornstein’s (1999) movement theory of control, analyses obligatory control configurations, those with aspectual verbs included, as implying raising. Along the same line, Cotfas (2011) argues that in Romanian aspectual verbs pass the diagnostics of raising verbs. Both these studies, however, investigated only the behaviour of some aspectual verbs ( a începe ‘begin’, a continua ‘continue’, a înceta ‘stop, end’), and focused on their 1 But see Landau (1999, 2000) for a different point of view. ROMANIAN ASPECTUAL VERBS: CONTROL AND RESTRUCTURING 5 syntactic behaviour when merging with a subjunctive complement. But given the different complementation properties illustrated in (1)-(5) above it is not implausible to assume that their behaviour is less homogeneous than previously assumed. In particular, the tense and structural properties of the clausal complement with which they merge in the derivation may induce different degrees of restructuring. These properties may also interact with the control vs. raising behaviour. 2. Aim The aim of the present paper is to investigate the behaviour of those Romanian aspectual verbs which denote the end of an activity and which select a supine complement: a termina ‘finish, stop’, a sfâr şi ‘stop, end’, a ispr ăvi ‘finish, end’, a mântui ‘finish’ (henceforth the a termina SUP class). I will focus on whether they evince control and/or raising behaviour and on whether they induce restructuring effects. Since the two phenomena have been argued to be correlated, I will evaluate the cross-linguistic validity of this claim starting from the behaviour of the Romanian aspectual verbs belonging to this class. I will then briefly compare the main results to the properties of configurations with the same aspectual verb and a different clausal complement. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: In section 3 I present the inventory of aspectual verbs which I investigate in the present paper. Section 4 provides arguments in favour of a control analysis of these verbs. I show that they pass all the standard diagnostics for control (see Davies & Dubinsky 2004 for a discussion of these diagnostics). I also show that they behave like verbs of exhaustive control (as defined in Landau 2000). According to Grano (2015), this property should be correlated with that of inducing restructuring effects. Since the aspectual verbs which I investigate in the present paper take a non-finite complement, which makes them straightforwardly compatible with restructuring, in section 5 I evaluate to what extent they behave like restructuring predicates. In order to do that, I use the main restructuring diagnostics discussed in Wurmbrand (2015), to which I add a few language specific ones. The data provide evidence that the a termina SUP verbs do indeed induce restructuring effects. Section 6 briefly presents data which show that the verbs belonging to this class do not represent a homogeneous class (as previously suggested in Gu ţu Romalo 1961/2013, L ăcătu ş 2015). They have distinct patterns of complementation and the size of the complement with which they merge in the derivation will determine the degree of transparency of their clausal boundary. Section 7 presents the main findings. 6 ELENA L ĂCĂTU Ş 3. Domain of investigation In Romanian, the aspectual verbs which denote the end of a state of affairs preferentially take a supine complement introduced by de (analysed as a mood marker, Giurgea & Soare 2010 or as a complementizer in a split FinP, Hill & Alboiu 2016). The supine is not preceded by de with all aspectual verbs. The clausal complement of the reflexive a se pune ‘start’ and a se apuca ‘start, begin’ is introduced by de (6): (6) Copilul s- a pus pe plâns. child-DEF REFL has started PE weep-SUP ‘The child started weeping.’ In the present study I analyse exclusively those aspectual configurations with de supine complements. Another point of difference is the compatibility of the aspectual verbs which denote the end of a state of affairs with a subjunctive clausal complement. Some of these verbs are dual mood predicates,