A D-TREE GRAMMARS ACCOUNT FOR ROMANIAN CASES OF FRONTING ANCA DINU Abstract. In this article we provide examples of D-Tree Grammars analysis for Romanian phrases which can not be correctly accounted for by plane TAG. We show that such cases are not isolated in Romanian: the case of questions with object fronting, multiple wh-words fronting and preposition phrase fronting (which actually ends in second position). We argue that DTG is a suitable framework for Romanian, both because they are linguistically well-motivated (they can be lexicalized, the elementary trees can be constructed based on linguistic evidence, the derivation tree is semantically relevant, etc) and because of their capability of accounting for diffcult Romanian syntactic construction of the type we present in this article. 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper we give an account for some Romanian cases of extraction in the framework of D-Tree Grammars (DTG), a Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) related formalism. Systematic analysis of extraction within the TAG formalism are proposed in Kroch, Joshi (1986) and Kroch (1989) and included in the development of the XTAG project for English (XTAG Research group, 1995) and the FTAG project for French (Abeillè 1991, Abeillé 2001, Candito 1999). An alternative description of extractions in TAG is given in (Kahane et al., 2000). The rest of the paper is structured as it follows. In section 2 we present the DTG formalism, its original motivation and give some linguistic examples. In section 3, some cases of Romanian extraction are discussed. We claim that in Romanian certain cases of extraction from wh-relative closes behave in a similar manner as their Kashmiri counterpart, which was a part of the original motivation for the introduction of DTG. We also provide linguistic examples of Romanian extraction of prepositional phrase, that are correctly analyzed by DTG, but cannot be analyzed by TAG. Section 4 is dedicated to the conclusions. 2. D-TREE GRAMMARS D-Tree Grammars (DTG) are introduced in Rambow et al. (1995). An interesting related formalism, D-tree substitution grammar, is introduced in Owen RRL, LII, 1–2, p. 223–229, Bucureşti, 2007