Noun+Noun Constructions in Written Romanian: What Do 'escrocii internet', 'Tribunalul Timiş' and 'preşedintele SIF' Have in Common?

Abstract

In this paper I present corpus-based results that attest a recent syntactic change in written Romanian styles. Statistical analyses of various patterns of noun + noun constructions that were automatically extracted from the “Evenimentul” corpus (ca. 37 million words, time span: 1999-2003) demonstrate a trend towards linguistic economization in the noun phrase, manifested as a simplification of syntactic components (through the omission of prepositions or genitives), and at the same time as a complexification of logical relations between the nouns. This trend may have its source in the “wooden language” at work during the communist regime (that is to say, a language-internal drift during the second half of the 20th century). More recently, this tendency has been abundantly reinforced by the transfer of typologically determined juxtaposed constructions from lingua franca English, which has had a major influence not only on contemporary Romanian lexis and morphology (cf. Constantinescu et al. 2002), but also on syntax.