Are there Slavonic features in the syntax of Romanian? Two case studies

Abstract

The present paper discusses the issue of the Old Church Slavonic influence on the syntax of (old) Romanian. The starting point is the hypothesis that many of the syntactic features of Romanian previously explained by postulating the influence of (Old Church) Slavonic (especially in studies strongly influenced by ideological issues, published during the Communist period) are actually either regular transformations which occurred in the transition from Latin to Romanian, common to the other Romance languages as well, or the output of more general tendencies manifested in the history of Indo-European languages. In order to check the role of the Slavonic influence in the syntax of Romanian, we have established a working algorithm, which is applied to two phenomena from old Romanian: (i) the position of relative adjectives, and (ii) scrambling in compound verbal forms in correlation with auxiliary inversion.

Keywords

• old Romanian
• Romanian-Slavonic contact
• relative adjectives
• scrambling
• auxiliary inversion