Abstract

What is traditionally labelled in Daco-Romance varieties as analytic marking of obliques by lui, lu, li, ii, le, etc. is – if the grammars and monographs are anything to go by – a kind of Cinderella, a minor, marginal aspect of the morphosyntax of these varieties. The grammars and monographs of the Daco-Romance varieties offer an over-simplified picture and, most significantly, they ignore the diachronic aspect of analytic marking of obliques. In this talk, I aim to present the diachronic development of the analytic marking of obliques by lui, lu, li etc., taking into account the classes of nouns in which it first appeared, its syntactic configurations, and its extension over time, including its sensitivity to register. I also (re)assess the relationship between the feature ‘animate’ and this analytic marking. On the basis of new data, I discuss the status of lui / lu, le etc. (are they (pre)proprial articles, i.e. articles with a distribution limited to proper nouns? oblique case markers?) and their grammaticalization.