Classifiers of quantity and quality in Romanian

The present paper proposes that classifiers in Romanian pertain to two distinct categories: classifiers of quantity or “massifiers” and classifiers of quality or “count-classifiers”, to borrow the terms from Cheng and Sybesma (1999). The first category is represented by the first nominal in a pseudopartitive construction of the type o bucată de brânză / a piece of cheese (Tănase-Dogaru 2009). The second category is represented by the first nominal in the so-called restrictive appositives, an example of which is Planeta Venus / the planet Venus (van Riemsdijk 1998, Cornilescu 2007). An important result of the paper is the unification under a similar treatment of concepts which are generally offered different analyses in the literature.