Elena Lăcătuș

Romanian Aspectual Verbs: Control and Restructuring

Introduction

Romanian aspectual verbs: control and restructuring. Examines Romanian aspectual verbs selecting supine complements for control and restructuring. Compares their behavior with subjunctive complements and clausal transparency.

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the behaviour of those Romanian aspectual verbs which denote the end of an activity and which select a supine complement. I focus on whether they evince control and/or raising behaviour and on whether they induce restructuring effects. The results show that these verbs behave like bona fide verbs of control and trigger restructuring. But they do not induce the same degree of restructuring. A brief comparison with the behaviour of the same aspectual verbs and a subjunctive complement reveals that the transparency of clausal boundaries is determined in the derivation, being directly dependent on the structural properties of the complement with which the aspectual verb merges. One further result of the analysis is that these verbs are dual mood choice verbs. They select the supine when the complement denotes an agentive durative process, and the subjunctive when they extend their range of complements to those which are, in principle, incompatible with their inherent agentive resultative value.

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