On the history of Romanian genitives: The prenominal genitive

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the behaviour of prenominal genitives in Old Romanian in contrast withModern Romanian. In the old language, the prenominal genitive is more widely used and occurs in threedistinct configurations: (i) it is a determiner genitive in DP-initial position and checks the definiteness featureof D in a local configuration, (ii) it is a lower determiner genitive which checks the definiteness feature of Dacross an intervening constituent, and (iii) it is an attributive/property genitive, similar to the attributivegenitive of English and to the genitival adjectives of (certain) Slavic languages. Of these three distinctconfigurations, only the first one is still available in Modern Romanian. In trying to provide an explanationfor the loss of some of the prenominal genitive patterns, we relate this phenomenon to changes in the syntaxof the definite article.

Keywords

• prenominal genitive
• determiner genitive
• property genitive
• syntactic variation
• syntactic change