The next session of Seminário CLUL is scheduled for the 13th of March at 5:00pm 

Professor Imola-Ágnes Farkas, Faculty of Letters of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Title: Resultative and cognate object constructions

This lecture focuses on cognate object constructions in Old Romanian. Although modern Romanian lacks (aspectual) cognate structures, more recent diachronic analyses stress the idea that the pattern with a cognate object is very frequent in Old Romanian. The analysis reveals that, in addition to the existence of a large number and wide variety of transitive and transitivizing verb–cognate object pairs, aspectual cognate constructions are also present in this stage of the language. The relevance of this is connected to the existence of a conceptual similarity and cross-linguistic correlation between (true) resultative constructions and goal-of-motion structures and, to a lesser degree, between these two telicity-marking constructions and aspectual cognate constructions. 

The generalization is that all three telicity-marking constructions should be available in satellite-framed languages (e.g. English, Hungarian). However, in verb-framed languages (e.g. Romance languages) all three telicity-marking constructions should equally be unavailable. We look at how these three constructions are present/absent in Hungarian and Romanian/Romance languages.