Distincția dintre tetic și categoric în limba română. Unele repere
The Distinction between Thetic and Categorical in Romanian. Some Highlights

Summary/Abstract: The Japanese linguist Sige-Yuki Kuroda implemented into twentieth-century linguistics the theory of the two fundamental types of judgments – thetic and categorical – “outlined” by the philosopher J. G. Fichte, proposed by Franz Brentano and developed by his disciple Anton Marty. According to Kuroda (1972), who applied this theory to the syntax of the Japanese language, the thetic judgment is a simple judgment, which “represents a simple recognition or rejection of the material of a judgment” (154), and the categorical judgment is a double judgment because “it consists in two acts: one of the recognition of that which is to be made the subject, and the other, the act of affirming or denying what is expressed by the predicate about the subject” (1972, 154). With reference to the Romanian language, Eugeniu Coșeriu (1994) highlighted a manifestation of the distinction thetic – categorical, in the ratio between “the constructions announcing a fact or an event” (thetic) (76), in which the predicate appears in the initial position, and “the constructions that say something about something” (categorical) (76), in which the subject occupies the first position. For example: “– What's going on? – A ship is coming.” (thetic) versus “A ship arrives every day at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.” (categorical) (Coșeriu 1994, 76). This paper addresses the distinction between thetic and categorical in Romanian, with special regard to the specificity and the functionality of the thetic constructions. Beyond a description of the thetic phenomenon, our approach aims to show the relevance of the opposition between thetic and categorical in a didactic context, presenting the difficulties derived from the respective distinction in the teaching/learning the Romanian as a foreign language.

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