Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics Series, Vol. 18

The book provides a formal analysis of root and complement clauses in Old Romanian. Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu examine the combination of Balkan syntactic patterns such as generalized subjunctive complementation on the one hand, and the Romance morphology that supplies complementizers and grammatical mood forms on the other. The consequences of this mixed typology range from root clauses with non-finite verbs to split heads and repeated recycling in clausal complements. The book argues that discourse triggers at the left periphery are responsible for fluctuations in verb movement in finite clauses, while with gerunds and imperatives verb movement follows from functional constraints. It further argues that clausal complements to control and raising verbs systematically display the pattern of the Balkan subjunctive, and that the spell out of these clausal complements has been repeatedly recycled during the development of Romanian. Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian presents a new perspective on the manifestation of Balkan Sprachbund properties in the language, and on the nature of parametric differences in relation to other Romance languages. It provides a unified explanation for a range of constructions that have previously been treated as separate phenomena, and places diachronic changes in Romanian in a wider context.

Virginia Hill has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Geneva (1991) and has been teaching at the University of New Brunswick-Saint John since 1990. She has published extensively on verb movement and complementation in Old and Modern Romanian, and on the interaction of conversational pragmatics and clause structure. She is the author of Vocatives: How Syntax Meets with Pragmatics (Brill 2014) and the editor of Comparative Studies in Romanian Syntax (Elsevier 2000) and of Formal Approaches to DPs in Old Romanian (Brill 2015). Gabriela Albiou has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Manitoba (2000) and has been teaching at York University since 2003. She has published on clause structure, Case and obligatory control in Romanian, and on the internal structure of clauses in Onondaga (Iroquoian). She is the author of The Features of Movement in Romanian(Bucharest University Press 2002), and the co-editor, with Andrei Avram, Larisa Avram, and Daniela Isac, of Pitar Mos: A Building with a View. Papers in Honour of Alexandra Cornilescu (Bucharest University Press 2007).