Morphosyntactic Mismatches Revisited: the Case of the Romanian Supine

This article proposes a general survey of a supposed mixed category in Romanian, namely the supine. It is shown that what seems to be a mixed verbal-nominal nature is a context-dependent behaviour, determined by syntactic categories that may select a supine form. The core argument is that the two behaviours are associated with different projections. These facts are naturally captured by the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology. Three forms of Romanian grammar are derived from the same underspecified item, which is a categorially neutral stem feeding derivational and inflectional processes. Arguments are provided from the behaviour of forms which involve the same stem: nominalizations and past participles.