Old Romanian pluralized mass and abstract nouns
Afiliații
- Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Str. Edgar Quinet 5–7, Sector 1, 010017 Bucharest, Romania
- “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics, Calea 13 Septembrie 13, 050711 Bucharest, Romania
Istoric
Received May 8, 2017
Accepted June 3, 2017
Published September 30, 2017
Rezumat
The analysis of a rich old Romanian corpus shows that the ‘pluralization’ of mass and abstract nouns is extremely frequent in old Romanian. The semantic effects of pluralization are similar for mass and abstract nouns, consisting in the creation of denotative and/or connotative semantic variants. Of the plural endings, –uri is specialized for the pluralization of mass nouns in Daco-Romanian. The evolution of the ending –uri illustrates the specific process by which a grammatical (plural) morpheme is converted into a lexical morpheme (the so-called ‘lexical plurals’). ‘Lexical plurals’ have isolated occurrences in other Romance languages, but they have not reached the spread and regularity they display in Romanian.
Drepturi de autor
© 2017 Autorii. Drepturile de publicare aparțin Revistei. Textul este accesibil în mod gratuit, în concordanță cu prevederile licenței Open Access CC-BY.