The rhetorical question and the prolepsis are part of the "toolkit" of any speaker, both of which have a pronounced agonistic character. The speaker uses a rhetorical question in order to make his opponent mentally recognize the obviousness of the implicit answer and accept its validity; at the same time, through prolepsis he anticipates a possible counterargument and offers an answer. These rhetorical devices help the speaker to control the communication flow both upstream and downstream. This concern, however, may produce interesting interference, such as that in which a rhetorical question merges with a prolepsis, giving rise to a hybrid figure, which may create problems of encoding and decoding illocutionary force, with direct effects on the argumentative configuration of the discourse.
Keywords: rhetorical question; prolepsis; anticipative interlocutive dialogism
Despite having Romanian as an official language, Dobrudja represents rather a multilingual region within Romania. Within this peculiar linguistic context, Romanian – Russian language contact found in Lipovan communities is clearly of interest, inasmuch as here (a variety of) Daco-Romanian meets a particular dialect of Russian, i.e. Lipovan Russian; thus, the Romanian spoken in these communities, i.e. Lipovan Romanian, is expected to be quite different than the standard language, bearing the signs of a long-lasting contact. In this paper I will focus on the effects of this contact upon the morphosyntax of Lipovan Romanian. In doing so, I will bring new data gathered from different ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork I have conducted in Lipovan communities (i.e., certain villages from Tulcea county) since February 2018.
Keywords: contact language; morphosyntactic consequences; Lipovan community; Romanian-Russian contact language
Starting from the performative utterance, developed in the theory of linguistic acts by John Langshaw Austin, this article aims to analyze some passages of Gherasim Luca’s Romanian work, The Inventor of Love, which preceded his French poetry. His bilingualism stimulated his search for all that is irreversible, real, and concrete, showing the infinite plastic possibilities of words. His performances of the 60’s and 70’s, together with the shows created by the French choreographers, have opened up a large space for reflection, in which the poetic and dancing subjects have the power to open themselves to incompleteness and diversity. Hence, the ambition of some artists to create a dialogue between the two languages, where one completes the other in the dimension of otherness. Starting from Romanian, Gherasim Luca created another language in French, a language in the language, which gave him the opportunity to express himself otherwise.
Keywords: Gherasim Luca; poetry; body; language; dance; performative; Romanian literature.
In his study, the author proposes a discussion upon the spoken Romanian language, as it was registered within the pages of a bilingual grammar appeared in Wien at the end of the 18th century, more exactly, in Ioan Piuariu-Molnar’s Gramatică germano-română (1788) ‘Romanian-German Grammar’. Beyond the descriptive characteristics of the grammar, within its pages, there is enclosed a range of conversational sentences (Some dialogues to express many ways of previous moods), where spoken language facts can be revealed, along the state of the Romanian language from that period, which can help us understand the most popular subjects or greetings of those times. Beside these aspects, the presenting method continues to be interesting, faithful sometimes to some models which overtook the Western Europe.
Keywords: grammar; spoken Romanian language; German language; RFL (Romanian Foreign Language); dialogues
This paper focuses on the class of N-words in the Aromanian dialect of Romanian. Being a cross-linguistically central topic in the typological study of negation, the semantic status of the N-words remains a controversial subject. While the Standard Romanian N-words have benefited from various interpretations in the literature (as existential quantifiers under negation, universal quantifiers above negation, free choice items, negative polarity items or negative quantifiers), the N-word paradigms in the South-Danube dialects of Romanian have not been studied yet. This paper offers an analysis and a classification of the Aromanian N-words (or Negative Concord Items), serving also as a typological characterization of the negation system in this dialect.
Keywords: negation; N-words; Negative Concord; typology; dialectology; Aromanian; Romanian.
The present article explores the lasting impact of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur on Emil Cioran’s thought. As a young philosopher, Cioran took a particular interest in Freudian theories, although he later expressed a sort of hostility for psychoanalysis, considering it as a pseudo-scientific discipline and no more than a “sham of a religion”. The paper argues that, despite this attitude, Cioran was very influenced by the reading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. This study focuses on the Freudian notion of death drive (Todestrieb), aiming to identify its trace in Cioranian concepts of boredom, melancholy, agony, and the long-lasting agony of the premises of life.
Keywords: Freud; psychoanalysis; Cioran; Todestrieb; agony; melancholy; death.
In 1930 B. Fundoianu published a collection of some of his Romanian poems, Priveliști. Despite what its title may suggest, its verses are not descriptive but rather visionary and expressionist. Silence plays a very important role within Priveliști’s poems, and – as I demonstrate in this essay – contributes to the images that evoke the ideas of regeneration and rebirth. In the first part of the study I focus on the relationship between text and image in a symbolic perspective. Then I offer a definition of metaphor in the perspective of contextual analysis. In the second part of the study, I describe the Fondanian images in which silence appears either as an active force of regeneration or as a propitious environment for the germination of matter. I conclude with a description of Fundoianu’s metaphorical images in which silence is associated with the soul.
Keywords: B. Fundoianu; image; symbol; silence; regeneration; soul.
In the context of the Romanian recent protests without leaders, the possibility for some authority figures to stand up to the streets wishes created the setting for the emergence of heroic actions. This is the case with the Romanian president who by direct actions, public image strategies and feedback from the social media activists managed to endorse the street demand to further energise the unrest masses in their attempt to gain legitimacy by contesting authority.
Keywords: culture of conflict; heroic hybridity; remediation of heroes.
The paper proposes a comparison between the old terms, preserved from Latin, which designate the notions of “colour” and “to colour” in Romanian, Albanian, and Western Romance languages. Romanian did not inherit words to denominate the action “to colour”, whereas Albanian borrowed the Lat. intingere and Western Romance area preserved the verb tingere with this meaning. In form, the Albanian language corresponds to Romanian (a întinge), and, in meaning, to the Romanian (“to dip”) and to the Western Romance languages (“to colour”) as well, being the only one that maintains (for the prefixed form intingere) both meanings of Lat. tingere. The present description of the connexions between Eastern and Western Romance areas, witnessed by Albanian language, with respect to the notions “colour” and “to colour”, is possible due to the etymology proposed for Alb. ngjyej by I.-A. Candrea. This etymological solution, which was not taken into account by following studies, is reinforced by the comparison with the Western Romance languages.
Keywords: preservation of Latin elements in Eastern Latin, Albanian, and Western Romance languages; etymology of Alb. ngjyej “to dip”, “to colour”.