An Revealed Adverb from Ancient Romanian Writings: adevăr. Etymological, Lexical and Grammatical Contributions Cover Image

Un adverb scos la iveală din vechile scrieri româneşti: adevăr. Contribuţii etimologice, lexicale şi gramaticale
An Revealed Adverb from Ancient Romanian Writings: adevăr. Etymological, Lexical and Grammatical Contributions

Author(s): Adrian Chircu
Subject(s): Morphology, Syntax, Lexis, Philology
Published by: Editura Tracus Arte
Keywords: Romanian language; Romance languages; diachronic; adverb; adjective; preposition; vocabulary; morphosyntax;

Summary/Abstract: In the current study, the author aims to continue the detailed analysis of the inherited Latin adjectives used adverbially in Romanian in order to highlight the lexical-semantic and functional features of the word adevăr ‘really’ in the ancient period, when it had different uses. The starting point for the analysis was some previous contributions, in whose pages aspects concerning adjectives with similar morphosyntactic behavior have been described, some of them, at that time, being presented sequentially, revealing the typological characteristics of the class and less the morphological or the phraseological (implicitly prepositional) variation of each lexical unit. The choice of this adverbial adjective as the main topic of the current analysis is also explained by the fact that, in ancient texts, its number of occurrences was relatively significant because it was often found in the structure of adverbial phraseological units. For a proper interpretation, the author uses a corpus of ancient language (SOR Corpus), which facilitates an objective analysis of language facts. It also refers to similar studies and dictionaries of Romance languages to show the similarities between them, more exactly similar uses, confirming the unity of the Neolatin idioms regarding the adverbials. In this paper, the author will prioritise several perspectives: the etymological, the Romance, the morphological, the structural and the syntactic. The main aim is to illustrate the dynamics of this adverb in the ancient language, which was, naturally, much more striking than nowadays. This analysis will undoubtedly make it possible to identify certain constants and relate them to other adverbial adjectives in order to confirm or refute some trends in the language or to seek the fixing of some structures or the generalization of some particular phraseological variants.

  • Issue Year: XIX/2023
  • Issue No: 1 (37)
  • Page Range: 13-31
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Romanian