The place of theme-subject in French and Romanian Cover Image

Mise en place du sujet-thème en français et en roumain
The place of theme-subject in French and Romanian

Author(s): Liana Pop
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Editura Echinox
Keywords: -

Summary/Abstract: The article is based on the theoretical results already existing for French and is trying to draw a comparison with the situation in Romanian. For the written register, the observations refer to texts translated from French into Romanian, and more precisely, to the interventions of the proof-reader who is often obliged to adapt to the spirit of the Romanian language certain syntactic solutions suggested by the translator, which may be too dependant on the French configurations (syntactic loan translation). For the oral register, the observations start from a few cases from spoken French discussed in the Constanţa Seminar in 2005, but also from other oral corpora available for the two languages. The results point out solutions specific to French and Romanian for the position of the subject or theme within the discourse, but also solutions specific to Romanian for the fuzzy function of theme-subject at the level of personal pronouns and nouns. The syntactic differences are explained through the peculiarities of the morphological systems of the two languages. This description may be useful to translators and interpreters who are sometimes tempted to follow the French syntactic model, thus affecting the specific character of the Romanian language.

  • Issue Year: 2006
  • Issue No: 03
  • Page Range: 26-50
  • Page Count: 25
  • Language: French