translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos

Carmen Ciobanu
The ‘Talk Much’ Paradigms in English and Romanian
20 As complexes of verbal action and modifier, MOSVs can define all the parametres of the communicative situation, that
is, Speaker (role, age, sex, temperamental type, etc.), Message (vocal, articulatory or auditory characteristics), Addressee,
Patient and Evaluation. The main distinction that operates within the reference structure of these verbs is between
Participants and accompanying Circumstances, i.e. Cause of the action (e.g. a particular emotion), Purpose, Result,
Surroundings or Hierarchy among participants.
21 Extensively used in the Bible, and possibly generated by mistranslation, this device was labelled “construcţie bumerang”
(i.e. boomerang construction) by Corneliu Dimitriu (1986: 37-39). The structure may contain either the same or two
synonymous LAVs in different inflexional forms or a verb of movement and a LAV, e.g.: “... so then he goes and says...”
Compare the English and the Romanian versions: “And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt,
saying, ... Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every
man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers.” (THE HOLY BIBLE, Exodus, Chapter 12, p.71) – Apoi a grăit
Domnul cu Moise şi Aaron în pământul Egiptului şi le-a zis: ... Spune dar la toată obştea fiilor lui Israel şi le zi: În ziua a
zecea alunii acesteia să-şi ia fiecare din capii de familie un miel...” (BIBLIA, Cap. 12 Ieşirea, p. 79) Aurelia Merlan
(1998: 175) wrote that such structures illustrate a process of reformulation typical of vernacular varieties of Italian,
French, Romanian as well as of English, when the speaker’s thought moves back to an element of the initial syntacticosemantic
project.
22 Bolinger, Dwight, 1972, Degree Words, Mouton, The Hague. Paris. For Bolinger, intensification is „the linguistic
expression of exaggeration and depreciation...,” (1972: 2) and an intensifier is “any device that scales a quality, whether
up or down or somewhere between the two,” (idem: 19), e.g. She’ll talk your head off (she talks a blue streak).
23 So is considered to be a “relatively grammaticized” intensifier which “quite closely matches, in meaning, the
intensifiable feature of the verb.” (Bolinger 1972: 174)
24 Intra- and inter-corpora feed back has also contributed to the selection of field members. For example, gossip, marked
[-Transitive] belongs with talk and chat, whereas bârfi is [+/-Transitive], e.g. a bârfi verzi şi uscate.
25 Cf. CCD: TALK3 (vi) ‘to use speech to express your feelings’; TALK 4 (vi) ‘to chat’; Cf. DEX: VORBI 1 (vt) , in
phrases like: a vorbi multe şi de toate / vrute şi nevrute / verzi şi uscate câte-n lună şi în stele; VORBI 2 (vi) ‘a sta de
vorbă’, ‘a discuta’; VORBI2 (vt) ‘a discuta’
26 Drawing on William Croft’s (1991) approach to semantic classes (i.e. Objects, Properties and Actions) and pragmatic
functions (i.e. Reference, Modification and Predication), we consider all the constituents of the field to be instantiations
of verbal communication as action.
27 This subparadigm seems to be richer in Romanian.
28 MOSVs whose Source field denotational meaning gets a familiar everyday connotational meaning, have emerged as
‘implicite metaphors’ through the semantic process of ‘metacommunication’, or as or ‘figurative synonyms’ of concrete
terms, as in: bootlick (AmE v i,t), bootlicking, bootlicker ‘ (‘flatterer’) – peria ( v.i), periere, periuţă.
29 The axiological value of words denoting animal metaphors cannot be separated from their stylistic value.
30 We have approached this paradigm in Ciobanu Carmen, ‘Articulator Metaphors: GURĂ - MOUTH’ (in print).
Bibliography:
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