Abstract: Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian. This paper examines the syntactic and semantic status of Romanian PPs headed by the morphologically complex prepositions până în/la ʻuntil/as far as/up to in/at’ in VPs of change of location (a pluti până în peșteră ʻfloat up to the caveʼ) and change of state (a munci până la epuizare ʻwork to the point of exhaustionʼ). Contrary to the claims made in the literature (Barbu 2015), the approach taken here argues that these – and other similar – VPs cannot be considered complex event constructions such as goal-of-motion structures and strong resultative constructions, respectively. The discussion revolves around the interpretation of the entire VP, the lack of any type of restriction on the syntactic and semantic classification of the verb, the violation of the Direct Object Restriction, as well as the borderline between these PPs and temporal adjuncts. These properties highlight the fact that the availability of such VPs does not turn Romanian into a satellite-framed language as they are not real counterexamples to the Talmian generalization according to which verb-framed Romanian disallows these two complex event constructions.

Keywords: goal-of-motion structure, resultative construction, VP, până-PP, Romanian