3.2.7. Romanian Article

3.2.7.1. Notes

• Type: Although it presents only a few items, the article in Romanian has four types, unlike in most of the European languages. Beside the two recommended types: definite and indefinite which have the generally known semantic value, Romanian uses two additional types of articles, which are semantically subordinated to the definite article but which have special forms and meanings: (1) the possessive article (also called genitival article) is an element in the structure of the possessive pronoun, of the ordinal numeral (e.g. al meu (mine) and al treilea (the third)), and of the indefinite genitive forms of the nouns (e.g. capitol al cărţii (chapter of the book)). (2) the demonstrative article links a definite noun to its determinants, links a numeral or an adjective to a noun, and it is a constituent part of the relative superlative (e.g. fata cea mare (the elder girl), cel lenes, (the lazy), respectively prietenul cel mai bun (the best friend)).
• Note that the definite article has only enclitic forms, except for one proclitical form (lui + proper noun: lui Ion).
• Clitic: The inflected forms of the foreign-origin words (mainly nouns) not fully assimilated, are usually written with a hyphen between the base-form and the inflectional ending. In our encoding, we classified these endings (which are supposed to be split by the segmenter) as clitic articles (clitic attribute is always "y") which can be either definite (type=f, "-istul") or indefinite (type=i, "ist") and are characterised by gender (gender=m, "ist"; gender=f, "istă"), number (number=s, "ist"; number=p, "işti") and case (case=r, "istul"; case=o, "istului").