The perfective auxiliary o in the Moldavian variety. Diachrony and synchrony

Abstract

The aim of the paper is the analysis of the perfective auxiliary o in the Moldavian variety. The paper starts by discussing the origin, the dating, the localization, and the evolution of the form o in Romanian, until the 19th century. Against the literature and the linguistic atlases according to which the form o is general in Moldavia, our corpus study has revealed that the forms a and au are also used alongside the form o, under the influence of the standard language; moreover, the form o shows a tendency towards specialization for contexts with multiple cliticization.Our analysis—which contributes to the understanding of the phonology-morphology interface—can be extended to the study of other regional varieties of Romanian.

Keywords

• Moldavian variety
• auxiliary
• compound past
• assimilation
• cliticization