Two Romanian nominalizations, the infinitive and the supine, are compared in Noun+Object (NO) and Noun+Subject (NS) structures, regarding their ability to yield e-(vent)/r-(esult) readings. The NO structures behave alike and yield e-readings. The two NS structures contrast sharply: the infinitive NS is always an r-nominal, the supine NS may be an e-nominal. This contrast between the infinitive and the supine follows from their aspectual properties. While the supine is [−Telic], and may project either an Object or a Subject in e-nominals, the infinitive is [+Telic], and REQUIRES the projection of the Object. This constraint may follow from the fact that in nominals Aspect and Case are checked in the same projection.

Romanian possesses a reflexive passive structure, the se-passive, where se is a reflexive clitic, and a copular passive, formed with the auxiliary fi ‘be’. For both passives, the passivized object is either nominal or clausal. While for nominal objects there is a balanced distribution of the two passives, with clauses, there is a sharp difference of acceptability between clausal se-passives and clausal fi-passives. Clausal se-passives occur with any transitive verb and sound perfect. Clausal fi-passives are infrequent and sometimes even unattested. The aim of this paper is to present an account of this difference, while also predicting which syntactic means improve the acceptability of fi-passives. We argue that the contrast between clausal fi- and se- passives springs from the different manner in which the features of Tense, in particular the uD feature, are checked, and show that it is only in se-passives that all the features of T are valued.

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Romanian, as well as certain varieties of Spanish (but not Iberian Spanish, French or Italian) allow the clitic doubling of direct objects (indirect objects will be left out here),1 a phenomenon that is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences: in Spanish, but not in Romanian, clitic doubling is blocked by contrastive Focus and quantificational features. Our analysis of this contrast will rely on the following theoretical ingredients: (i) (most cases of) Head-Movement will be analyzed in terms of Head to Head Merge (Dobrovie-Sorin 2000; Dobrovie-Sorin & Galves 2000); (ii) clitic placement will be analyzed as a Spec-Head agreement configuration with a null pronounpro sitting in the Spec of (the complex head containing) the clitic (revised version of Sportiche 1996); (iii) clitic doubling will be analyzed as resulting from an interarboreal operation (Bobaljik & Brown 1997) that merges a complex head Cl+Vv+T(ense) with the vP containing the clitic doubled dp; (iv) the contrasts between Romanian and (River Plate) Spanish will be analyzed as being due to the fact that in Spanish, Spec,CP is distinct from Spec,Cl+Vv+T, whereas in Romanian, comp is part of the complex functional head clustering around T, and correlatively, Spec,C is not distinct from, but rather a slot inside the Spec of the complex head Comp+Cl+Vv+T.

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