The Syntax and Semantics of Bare Subjunctives in Romanian: a Balkanism

Abstract

The aim of this MA thesis is to analyse bare subjunctive structures in Romanian in order to account for the syntactic and semantic behaviour of such constructions. The analysis, although focusing on Romanian, will be placed in a broader context, namely the Balkan Sprachbund. It is well-known that the languages of the Balkan Peninsula share common linguistic features, among which subjunctive structures in both embedded and root clauses. While embedded subjunctives in these languages have been widely studied because of their substitution of the Romance-type embedded infinitive, bare subjunctives have received less attention. In this thesis I will introduce Romanian subjunctive structures from a typological and a diachronic point of view, then I will give an analysis of the syntactic distribution of bare subjunctives, mainly focusing on the syntactic status of the subjunctive marker. I will also analyse them from a semantic point of view, showing the different modal meanings they possess. In addition to the analysis of Romanian bare subjunctives, I will also review some relevant studies concerning the same structures in other Balkan languages, namely Albanian, Bulgarian and Greek.