Re- prefixation and Talmy’s parameter Oana S˘ avescu Ciucivara and Jim Wood New York University 1. Introduction Talmy (1985) proposed that English and the Romance languages differ in that the latter generally express "path" in verb roots, whereas the former expresses "path" in satellite morphemes such as prepositions. English put is a suppletive form expressing a “non- directional ‘putting’ notion,” its directional component being “determined completely by the particular Path particle and/or preposition present” (Talmy 1985:71). By contrast, Ro- mance languages generally incorporate a directional notion directly into put verbs, but are unable to encode “manner” and direction at the same time. While the Romanian (1) is unambiguously locative, its English counterpart can be interpreted as directional. (1) Sticla bottle.the va will pluti float sub under pod. bridge ‘The bottle will float AT/*TO a location under the bridge.’ In this paper, we present novel data from Romanian re- prefixation, arguing that it provides support for a structural difference between certain English and Romanian constructions with put and related verbs: (2) A has repus reput radioul radio.the în into func¸ tiune. function ‘He put the radio into use again.’ (3) Am have (*re)pus reput cartea book.the pe on raft. shelf ‘I put the book back on the shelf.’ ∗ Unless otherwise noted, all the Romanian data come from the first author’s native speaker intuitions in consultation with other speakers, and the Icelandic data come from the second author’s fieldwork with Icelandic speakers in New York City. Thanks to our informants for their time and energy. In addition, we would like to thank Alec Marantz and the participants of NELS 41 and LSA 2011 for helpful comments. Part of this work was partially supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62259, Project “Applied social, human and political sciences” co-financed by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013, obtained by the first author. © 2010 by Oana S˘ avescu Ciucivara and Jim Wood Emily Elfner and Martin Walkow (eds.), NELS 36: 2–13