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Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian

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Published/Copyright: March 30, 2019

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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Accepted: 2018-08-05
Published Online: 2019-03-30
Published in Print: 2019-04-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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