https://irhunibuc.wordpress.com/dr-adina-dragomirescu/
Adina Dragomirescu
University of Bucharest
The diachrony of Romance: The view from Romanian
This class had three main goals:
1. Answering the question why is not old Romanian so old as the other Old Romance languages.
For this goal, I will shortly present the periodization of Romanian (in comparison to other Romance varieties), and the main types of text available for the study of the old period (1500-1780).
2. Answering the question why Romanian is no longer a ‘Cinderella’ among the Romance languages. In order to do that, I will present the recent literature, in English, related to Romanian (GR, SOR, OHR) or related to the Romance languages, but where Romanian has a special place.
3. Presenting the main syntactic features of old Romanian, teasing out the Romance features, the Balkan features and the features specific to Romanian, which are neither Romance, nor Balkan.
4. Revealing old Romanian as an unknown source for the study of the changes that happened in the setting of the head parameter. Although the passage from head-final to head-initial is a well-known phenomenon for Latin and the Romance Languages (Ledgeway 2013), it has been only sporadically mentioned for Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and the Slavonic languages (Pancheva 2008, Migdalsky 2018). As a Romance language strongly influenced by OCS, old Romanian interestingly mirrors this change in the head parameter that seems to also characterize OCS, if not maybe all the languages in the area.
Selected references
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics, 2022, ed. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, 2016, ed. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, 2011/2013, ed. Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith, Adam Ledgeway, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Ledgeway, Adam, 2013, From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
GR 2013 – Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (ed.), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
SOR 2016 – Gabriela Pană Dindelegan (ed.), The Syntax of Old Romanian, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
OHR 2022 – Martin Maiden, Adina Dragomirescu, Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Oana Uță Bărbulescu, Rodica Zafiu, The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Pancheva, Roumyana, 2008, ‘Head-directionality of TP in Old Church Slavonic’, in: A. Antonenko, J. Bailyn, C. Bethin (eds), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting, 2007. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2008, 313‒332.
Migdalsky, Krzysztof, 2018, ‘Head directionality in Old Slavic’, in: D. Lenertová, R. Meyer, R. Šimík, L. Szucsich (eds), Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2016, 241–263, Berlin, Language Science Press.
ECLASS:
> Participants will receive a link for an e-class & dropbox.
