The MIHI EST construction : : An instance of non-canonical subject marking in Romanian / / Mihaela Ilioaia.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2023 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Ilioaia, Mihaela,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie , 481
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XXII, 334 p.)

This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries. The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of abbreviations -- List of tables -- List of figures -- Chapter 1 Romanian between Romance and South-East European languages -- Chapter 2 The object of the study -- Part 1: The mihi est construction -- Chapter 3 The mihi est construction as a complex-predicate construction -- Chapter 4 Corpus and methodology -- Chapter 5 Nouns entering the mihi est construction -- Part 2: The subject and its properties -- Chapter 6 The subject: Toward a universal definition -- Chapter 7 Subject properties in Romanian -- Chapter 8 Identifying the subject of the mihi est construction -- Part 3: Expansion of the non-canonical pattern -- Chapter 9 Productivity of the mihi est construction -- Chapter 10 Summary and conclusions -- Bibliography -- Appendices -- Appendix 1 -- Appendix 2 -- Index of subjects -- Index of names