On the evolution of articles into agreement markers in Romanian and Albanian

ON THE EVOLUTION OF ARTICLES INTO AGREEMENT MARKERS IN ROMANIAN AND ALBANIAN Ion Giurgea * Abstract: This paper tries to elucidate the processes by which former determiners became preposed agreement markers in Romanian and Albanian. In both languages, these markers introduce genitives, agreeing possessors and ordinals. In Albanian the same forms are used as agreement prefixes on all old adjectives and participles and can precede cardinals in definite noun phrases. The fact that these items originate in definite determiners is proven not only by their forms, but also by the possibility of marking the matrix DP as definite when they occur in DP-initial position. I propose that the development definite determiner > agreement marker was made possible by the fact that these languages had specialized definite articles, a suffixal one and an independent, “strong” form which was used when suffixation was impossible. It is the strong form which evolved into specialized agreement markers. Another necessary condition for the reanalysis was the possibility for the strong form to appear in postnominal position, which I assume to have been provided by double- or poly-definite constructions. For Romanian, I propose that the reanalysis of al was made possible by the fact that it had restricted contexts of occurrence. For Albanian, where the strong forms must have also been used with adjectives, I adopt the view that a change in the unmarked adjective order from A-N to N-A was the main trigger of the reanalysis, starting from a stage in which postnominal adjectives could only appear in the double definiteness construction, where they were preceded by the article. A further possibility, for Albanian, is the (morphologically triggered) confusion between the strong article and a relativizer stemming from IE *yo-/*yā-, used to introduce postnominal modifiers. Keywords: genitive “articles”, preposed agreement markers, historical syntax, Romanian, Albanian 1. Introduction 1.1 Overview of preposed articles in Romanian and Albanian Romanian and Albanian are peculiar, inside the Indo-European family as well as among the languages of Europe 1 , by showing preposed agreement markers (PAM) introducing genitive noun phrases and agreeing possessors. In both languages, these markers, which agree with the “possessee”, introduce noun phrases marked for morphological dative case: (1) a. b. (2) a. b. * 1 o parte a oraşului a part-F PAM.F.SG city-the.DAT një pjesë e qytetit a part(F) F.SG.NOM city.the.DAT aceşti prieteni ai mei these friends.M PAM.M.PL my.M.PL këta miqtë e mi these friends.M.the PL.NOM/ACC my.M.PL (Rom.) (Alb.) (Rom.) (Alb.) Institutul de Lingvistică “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” and Universität Konstanz, . See Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2003). Ion Giurgea 24 Traditionally, these markers are called “articles” (Romanian articol, Albanian nyjë). However, it must be stressed that they do not have any determiner function in some of their uses, as can be seen from the examples (1)-(3) above. I use therefore the term “preposed agreement marker”, abbreviated PAM. In glosses, I only use PAM for Romanian because its agreement marker al can be decomposed into a root a- and a -feature morpheme; for Albanian, where such a decomposition is impossible, I only indicate the agreement features. The distribution of these items is not identical in the two languages – it is much wider in Albanian – but they share a number of properties: the possibility to mark definiteness in the DP-initial position, and, as I will show in this paper, the origin: both come from the same item as the definite article. In this paper, I discuss the origin of these markers. After arguing in section 2 that they both originate in strong forms of the definite article, I will try to explain in section 2 why they were reanalyzed into PAMs. In the rest of this section, I present the distribution of these markers in the attested stages of the two languages. 1.2 Genitival and possessive PAMs With DPs other than personal pronouns, these markers are not attached at the word level, but to the whole noun phrase2 (they are phrasal agreement markers), as can be seen, among others, from the fact that they can combine with a coordination of noun phrases 3 : (3) a. b. primul sindicat al [medicilor şi first-the trade-union PAM.M.SG physicians-the.DAT and asistenţilor] (Rom.) nurses-the.DAT ministria e [arësimit dhe kulturës] (Alb.) ministry.F.the FSG.NOM education.the.DAT and culture.the.DAT With pronominal possessors, such coordination is ruled out in both languages. In Romanian, pronominal possessors, both agreeing and dative-marker, have been shown to qualify as weak forms in Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) typology (see Dobrovie-Sorin and Giurgea 2011): (4) * primul sindicat al nostru şi *(al) vostru /lor first-the trade-union PAM.M.SG our.M.SG and (PAM.M.SG) your.M.PL/them.DAT In Albanian, the weak character of pronominal possessors has led to a greater differentiation between agreeing possessors and genitives: the PAM has been fused with the pronominal form in a part of the paradigm – see, e.g. the declension of the 2nd singular possessors (the forms representing the article, either fused or not, are boldfaced): 2 As noticed by Faensen (1975) for Albanian, who gives the example under reproduced under (3)b) here. For Romanian, see Dobrovie-Sorin and Giurgea (2005), Giurgea and Dobrovie-Sorin (2013). 3 The PAM can also be repeated before each conjunct. Traditional grammars of Romanian actually recommend to repeat it. On the evolution of articles into agreement markers in Romanian and Albanian (5) Nom. Acc. Dat. m. sg. yt tënd tënd f. sg. jote tënde sate m. pl. e/të tu e/të tu të tu 25 f. pl. e/të tua e/të tua të tua In Romanian, the PAM is absent when the genitive immediately follows the suffixal definite article: (6) sfârşitul luptelor end-the fights-the.DAT Syntactic studies (Ortmann and Popescu 2000, Dobrovie-Sorin and Giurgea 2005, 2011, Beavers and Teodorescu 2012, Giurgea and Dobrovie-Sorin 2013) have shown that the absence of the article is a surface structure phenomenon and does not involve a different mechanism of genitive licensing. Thus, if the genitive immediately following the definite noun is coordinated with another genitive, the PAM normally appears on the second genitive, as in (see (7a)); moreover, the PAM must appear if the genitive phrase is modified by a focal particle, as in (7b), and if the definite article is separated from the genitive by a parenthetical, as in (7c). Finally, in the old language, which had case agreement with appositions, the PAM could appear in apposition to a genitive where PAM was absent because of the adjacency with the definite article, as in (7d): (7) a. b. c. d. Casa [[Mariei ] şi [?(a) surorii ei]] a fost vândută. house-the Maria-the.OBL and AL sister-the.OBL her has been sold Este casa [chiar [*(a) mamei lui]]. is house.the even AL.F.SG mother.the.OBL his Începutul, a (...truncated)