Noun Morphology in Romanian

Abstract

0. This paper is a morphophonemic and morphemic study of a class of Romanian words defined by their inflectional behavior as nouns. The point of departure is an array of isolated examples in phonemic form; the result is a classification of nouns by morphological types and a morphemic formula. The corpus from which the examples are drawn consists of Romanian texts' interpreted with the aid of native speakers, supplemented with utterances by the speakers themselves.2 The underlying phonemic analysis is the author's. Phonemic data are here given for orientation only; they do not pretend to be a complete presentation of Romanian phonology. The phonemes of standard Romanian3 are the following: SYLLABIC: two front vowels /i e/, three central vowels /i a a/, and two back vowels /u o/, of which /i i u/ are high, /ea ~/ are mid, /a/ is low; NONSYLLABIC: six labial consonants /p b f v m w/, eight alveolar consonants /t d c s z n 1 r/, five palatal consonants /6 g A j/, and three velar consonants /k g h/; ACCENTUAL: one stress /'/ and three pitches /1 2 3/;4 JUNCTURAL: one phraseinternal juncture /+/ and three phrase-final junctures /I II ./. The language has phonological words, defined as free forms with a single stress, e.g. /kibriturile/ 'the matches', /deobi66j/ 'usually', /umpri6ten/ 'a friend'. It also has morphological words; without recourse to syntax one can isolate four classes by the type of inflection which they exhibit in paradigms: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs.5 We are here concerned exclusively with nouns.