The Verb Complex in Romanian: A Case Study on the Interaction between Morphology and Syntax

This paper focuses on the verbal domain in Romanian & discusses the theoretical implications of the generalizations that emerge. (Purely) syntactic analyses are shown to be at a disadvantage due to the special property of the so-called verb complex to behave as a single unit. While morphosyntactic accounts are more desirable, they too run into some problems. On the one hand, intensifiers & the perfective morpheme fi raise challenges to the Mirror Principle & the left-adjunction requirement on head movement. On the other hand, Romanian verbal inflection exhibits a number of syncretism & multiple exponence cases that cannot be easily accommodated by a theory in which morphological & syntactic structures are isomorphic. References. Adapted from the source document