The MIHI EST construction
About this book
This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries.
The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?
Author / Editor information
Mihaela Ilioaia, Ghent University, Belgium.
Reviews
"a thorough and valuable analysis of the mihi est pattern in Romanian and an exquisite example of experimental research in linguistics."
– Alina Tigău, Romanische Forschungen 137 (2025), 301.
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Acknowledgements
VII -
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Contents
IX -
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List of abbreviations
XV -
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List of tables
XIX -
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List of figures
XXI -
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Chapter 1 Romanian between Romance and South-East European languages
1 -
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Chapter 2 The object of the study
39 - Part 1: The mihi est construction
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Chapter 3 The mihi est construction as a complex-predicate construction
51 -
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Chapter 4 Corpus and methodology
74 -
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Chapter 5 Nouns entering the mihi est construction
85 - Part 2: The subject and its properties
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Chapter 6 The subject: Toward a universal definition
115 -
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Chapter 7 Subject properties in Romanian
137 -
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Chapter 8 Identifying the subject of the mihi est construction
193 - Part 3: Expansion of the non-canonical pattern
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Chapter 9 Productivity of the mihi est construction
229 -
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Chapter 10 Summary and conclusions
278 -
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Bibliography
291 - Appendices
-
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Appendix 1
315 -
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Appendix 2
323 -
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Index of subjects
327 -
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Index of names
331
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- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
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10785 Berlin - productsafety@degruyterbrill.com
