Altceva decât nu … decât

Abstract

The paper contrasts the exceptive constructions containing the particle decât in Romanian, namely nu…decât and nu…alt+ceva/cineva decât, considering the semantic and syntactic properties of these two constructions against the background of the analysis proposed by von Fintel (1993) for English exceptive constructions. It will be shown that (i) exceptives have a common core semantic content but they differ crosslinguistically especially in terms of syntactic behaviour; (ii) the two Romanian constructions differ semantically and syntactically and do not support an ellipsis analysis. Based on synchronic properties as well as diachronic data the paper proposes that these are two independent constructions, the first one containing a null quantifier. Given the semantic similarities between this construction and doar and numai, the paper argues for a uniform treatment of restrictive focus particles.

Keywords

• focus particles
• exceptives
• restrictives
• quantifier
• variable