Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian

Abstract

In this article we venture to elucidate the origin of the Albanian subjunctive marker të-. We contend that this marker is historically linked to a morphosyntactic device which is traditionally described as linking article and which licenses nominal syntactic units as constituents of larger syntactic units. Based on the observation that there is a substantial distributional, functional and semantic overlap between nonfinite verbal forms marked with të- and finite subjunctive predicates, we propose that the subjunctive marker spread a Show more