Are cine analiza? Sintaxa relativei infinitivale

This paper investigates a peripheral yet revealing syntactic structure in Romanian – the infinitival relative construction, exemplified by sentences like are cine veni(‘there is someone to come’) or e ce mânca (‘there is something to eat’). Infinitival relatives are selected by the verbs a avea (‘to have’) or a fi (‘to be’), and are part of the broader class of MECs (modal existential constructions). Despite its use in the spoken language, this construction has received relatively little attention in the scholarship. Based on corpus data (roTenTen16) and native speaker judgments, the study provides a detailed syntactic and interpretive analysis of the structure, arguing in favour of its propositional status. More precisely, the infinitival relative is shown to be a reduced clause headed by a relative connector that projects a CP layer – a ‘reduced’ clause in the sense that the inflectional domain does not feature the entire range of functional projections in the IP-domain (in comparison to indicative or subjunctive clauses, for example). It is shown that the construction involves raising of the subject from the embedded infinitival clause to the higher selecting verb; thus, in these configurations, have and be are raising predicates. Following Grosu (2013), such constructions are interpreted as generalized existential quantifiers, exhibiting features distinct from free relatives and embedded questions. The study highlights the relevance of the Romanian infinitival relative for understanding clause structure and syntactic variation in Romanian and beyond.