In the present study, the evolution of two Latin patterns, MIHI EST and HABEO, is investigated for Romanian, paying special attention to the set of nouns with which they occur. In the literature, the MIHI EST pattern is mostly associated with nouns from the field of psychological and physiological states in Romanian, while for HABEO, no semantic categories have been proposed (cf. Ilioaia 2020, 2021; Ilioaia and Van Peteghem 2021; Vangaever and Ilioaia 2021). Bearing this in mind, the question arises as to how the two constructions interact with the set of nouns with which they occur throughout the six centuries documented for Romanian (16th – 21st c.).
In order to understand the dynamics of the set of nouns that occur with the MIHI EST and HABEO constructions, I carried out a corpus study based on texts from pre-21st century Romanian and from the present-day language. For pre-21st century Romanian, I worked with a corpus made by myself, which is accessible on demand for research purposes on the Sketch Engine platform. This corpus, labelled Pre-21st century Romanian, contains nearly six million words and comprises several types of texts: administrative, religious, literature. As for the present-day language, I worked with the Romanian Web 2016 (roTenTen16) corpus containing over two billion words from types of texts that can be found on the web, namely news/commercial/specialized websites, blogs, forums, which was compiled and made available on Sketch Engine.
In addition to the .csv file with the data, I include in this dataset a codebook for the respective data file, as well as files containing tables and graphs used in the related publication.
Abstract article:
In this article, I address the evolution of the competition between two Latin patterns, HABEO and MIHI EST, in Romanian. As opposed to the other Romance languages, which replace the MIHI EST pattern with HABEO in possessor and experiencer contexts, Romanian maintains both Latin patterns. The general evolution of these patterns in the Romance languages is well known, however, a detailed usage-based account is currently lacking.
Building on the theoretical findings on the role of functional competition in linguistic change, the rivalry between the two patterns in Romanian has already been argued to have settled in terms of differentiation, with each of the two forms specializing in different functional domains by Vangaever and Ilioaia in 2021 in their study “Specialisation through competition: HABEO vs. MIHI EST from Latin to Romanian”. With this idea as a starting point, I investigate, by means of a diachronic corpus study, whether the dynamics in the inventory of state nouns occurring in these constructions can affect their evolution and productivity. The preliminary results show that this is indeed the case. Concomitantly, I explore whether the historical changes that the two patterns have undergone over the centuries can be described in terms of grammaticalization, constructionalization, or in terms of constructional change. (2025-09-17) |
