Noun modification, pseudo-articles, and last resort operations in Arvantovlaxika and in Romanian

Abstract

Since the seminal work by Cinque [Paths Towards Universal Grammar, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 85], it has been widely assumed that nouns in the Romance languages, as opposed to nouns in English, raise to an intermediate projection between DP and NP thus deriving the word order difference between the English construction the illegal occupation ( of Iraq ) and the Spanish equivalent la ocupaci o ́ n ilegal ( de Irak ) . In this paper, I compare two Balkan Romance languages: Romanian and Arvantovlaxika, a dialect of Aromanian spoken in Thessaly, Greece. Arvantovlaxika, probably because of its contact with Greek, seems to have lost its ability to move the noun. The purpose of this paper is to study the consequences of such a loss with regards to modification by different types of adjectives and to the different realizations of the definite article in both languages. Because of the syntactic similarity that exists between Arvantovlaxika and Romanian, these two languages offer fertile ground for the study of microvariation. Different types of adjectives will be considered: descriptive adjectives, cardinal adjectives, demonstratives, ordinal adjectives and, finally, superlative adjectives. Following Giusti [Functional Structure in DP and IP, Oxford University Press, New York, 54] and the minimalist framework of Chomsky [Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 89; Ken Hale: A Life in Language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1], it will be argued that the realization of the enclitic definite article both in Arvantovlaxika and in Romanian as well as the realization of cel in Romanian are last resort operations, necessary to carry out the checking of a φ-features and an EPP feature on D. Some further consequences regarding the generation of ordinal adjectives and the hierarchy of adjectives proposed by Cinque [Paths Towards Universal Grammar, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 85] and Brugè [Categorie Funzionali del Nome Nelle Lingue Romanze, Cisalpino, Milano] will be explored.