Morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot in old Romanian
Morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot in old Romanian

Summary/Abstract: This article establishes and discusses a series of morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot ‘whole, all’ in old Romanian, relating them to modern Romanian: forms that disappeared from the language, a wider variety of singular and plural genitive-dative markers (synthetic, analytic and mixed), the more permissive word order and the possibility to occur in a structure with an undetermined noun. The description of the grammatical characteristics of the quantifier tot highlights a great variation: (i) between the synthetic, analytic and mixed realization of the genitive-dative case (toatei all.F.SG.GEN≡DAT ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun, a/la/de toată A/LA/DE all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + nominative-accusative noun, a toată A all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun); (ii) between the (pronominal and adjectival) form with the final particle –a and the one without –a (tuturor, tuturora ‘of all / to all’; tuturor oamenilor ‘of/to all the people’, tuturora fraților ‘of/to all the brothers’); (iii) between the postposition and anteposition of tot relative to certain pronouns (ei toți, toți ei ‘all of them’); (iv) between structures with a determined and an undetermined noun (toate zilele, toate zile ‘all the days’). The comparison with the modern language shows that, in some cases, this variation has been eliminated, and in other cases, it is preserved.

• Details
• Contents