The descendants of Lat. ipse in Romanian

Abstract

The Latin demonstrative ipse had different evolutions across the Romance languages, with Romanian being the one that preserved most of the source-language uses and enriched them with new ones. This article describes the evolution of the forms and functions of îns1, îns2/ins, îns(ă)3, însul, nusul, dînsul, adins, însuși, and of the bound focal particle –și in Romanian. The analysis is based on a rich corpus of old Romanian and non-standard regional varieties of modern spoken Romanian. The most significant phenomena in old Romanian compared to Latin are the proliferation of forms, the preservation of the old uses and the emergence of new ones, semantic enrichments, and a large number of lexical-functional synonymies. During the old Romanian period, the form–function correlations gradually changed, syntactically conditioned variants and differential prepositional object marking emerged, new meanings developed as contextual effects of the focal prototype, the syncretisms with the reflexive and reciprocal pronouns were limited, and the textual deictic was grammaticalized as an adversative conjunction. In modern Romanian, the number of ambiguities has decreased and register differences have appeared. The evolution of the Latin ipse in Romanian illustrates a case of poligrammaticalization and polimorfism, which is not singular in the history of the neo-Latin idioms.

Keywords

• Romanian
• Lat. ipse
• history of forms
• history of uses
• intensifier
• focal particle