Abstract
In this article we venture to elucidate the origin of the Albanian subjunctive marker të-. We contend that this marker is historically linked to a morphosyntactic device which is traditionally described as linking article and which licenses nominal syntactic units as constituents of larger syntactic units. Based on the observation that there is a substantial distributional, functional and semantic overlap between nonfinite verbal forms marked with të- and finite subjunctive predicates, we propose that the subjunctive marker spread across host classes from nominals to nonfinite predicates and to finite subjunctive predicates. The spread into the finite verbal domain is areally fostered, while the licensing device itself is an independent Albanian development that possibly picks up a vertical, Indo-European signal.
Acknowledgements
We are much indebted to Florian Wandl for discussion and hints and to two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are our own. This research was supported by the University Research Priority Program Language and Space from the University of Zurich.
Abbreviations
- adm
admirative
- aor
aorist
- g
third argument of a three-place predicate
- grad
gradation marker
- lc
licenser of constituency
- nonfin
nonfinite
- nt
neuter
- ptcl
particle
- subj
subjunctive
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The dance of expressive adverbials (“ideophones”) in Jamsay (Dogon)
- Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian
- The Great Complement Shift and the role of understood subjects: The case of fearful
- Inclusory pronouns in Mande: The emergence of a typological rarum
- Genre-related language change: Discourse- and corpus-linguistic perspectives on Austrian German 1970–2010
- Variation in the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: Gender and social class
- Article-like constructions and the definite-indefinite continuum in Croatian
- The variation of calques in European languages, with particular reference to Spanish and German: Main patterns and trends
- Book Reviews
- Laurie Bauer: Compounds and compounding
- Elisa Mattielo: Analogy in word-formation: A study of English neologisms and occasionalisms
- Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray: Grammatical complexity in academic English
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The dance of expressive adverbials (“ideophones”) in Jamsay (Dogon)
- Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian
- The Great Complement Shift and the role of understood subjects: The case of fearful
- Inclusory pronouns in Mande: The emergence of a typological rarum
- Genre-related language change: Discourse- and corpus-linguistic perspectives on Austrian German 1970–2010
- Variation in the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: Gender and social class
- Article-like constructions and the definite-indefinite continuum in Croatian
- The variation of calques in European languages, with particular reference to Spanish and German: Main patterns and trends
- Book Reviews
- Laurie Bauer: Compounds and compounding
- Elisa Mattielo: Analogy in word-formation: A study of English neologisms and occasionalisms
- Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray: Grammatical complexity in academic English