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Agreement Paradigms across Moods and Tenses: The Case of Romanian Subjunctives and Imperatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Mihaela Pirvulescu
Mihaela Pirvulescu*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

This article argues that the realization of agreement in subjunctive and imperative verbs is a consequence of the syntactic status of Tense in these two moods. Crucially, certain agreement paradigms across Romance languages show very a close resemblance: the subjunctive and imperative paradigms are identical, in most cases, to the indicative paradigms. Systematically, moods such as the subjunctive and the imperative do not show specific tense affixes or specific tense-induced allomorphy on their agreement affixes. The proposal is illustrated with Romanian verbal agreement, which is analyzed within the Distributed Morphology framework. The analysis shows that tense information is not used in subjunctive and imperative agreement morphology, unless it is exactly the same information as in another paradigm — the present indicative. It is proposed that at the syntactic level, Tense is unspecified in the subjunctive and absent in the imperative, and that the realization of agreement affixes is a consequence of this syntactic representation.

Résumé

Résumé

Dans cet article, je propose que les affixes morphologiques d’accord au subjonctif et à l’impératif sont réalisés en fonction du statut syntaxique du Temps dans ces deux modes. L’observation essentielle est que certains paradigmes à travers les langues romanes sont très semblables à d’autres paradigmes : c’est le cas de l’impératif et du subjonctif, qui sont identiques, dans la plupart des cas, à l’indicatif. De manière systématique, le subjonctif et l’impératif ne montrentpas d’affixes temporels ou d’allomorphie conditionnée par des trais temporels. Cette généralisation est illustrée avec les données du roumain, lesquelles sont analysées dans le cadre de la Morphologie distribuée. Selon cette analyse, les paradigmes d’accord du subjonctif et de l’impératif ne contiennent aucune information temporelle, sauf si cette information est identique à celle d’un autre paradigme. Le Temps est sous-spécifié au subjonctif et absent à l’impératif; la réalisation des affixes d’accord est une conséquence de la représentation syntaxique.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2009 

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