CAN SEMANTIC ROLES IMPACT ON SYNTACTIC RELATIONS?
CAN SEMANTIC ROLES IMPACT ON SYNTACTIC RELATIONS?

Summary/Abstract: Linguists and grammarians do not consider languages neat and symmetrical. That is why the varying grammatical behaviours of words are seen as a consequence of words’ meaning differences. The approach I have undertaken is a ‘meaning oriented’ one and the article will be a constant interplay between theory and examples extracted from the two short stories I have selected due to possible similarities and obvious differences. The theoretical parameters extracted from the case grammar framework allowed me the examination of the syntactic structures displayed by the two Romanian short stories writers’ prose - Peter Neagoe’s The Village Saint and Ion Agârbiceanu’s Bunica Safta. The way in which words are combined is different in English as compared to Romanian. Both writers seem to have a common denominator: the Transylvanian village. Even if their vision of the world is different (Neagoe is writing in English and Agârbiceanu is writing in Romanian), their mentality is similar: the rural universe is defined by primitive ‘rules’, the characters act very often on instinct. The characters’ messages are selected in specific syntactic arrangements that give a peculiar importance to the semantic roles. The semantic and the syntactic constructions in both Romanian and English short stories are determined by principled interaction between the minor and the major word classes.

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