Open AccessAction and agency in complex sentences from present-day Romanian
Author(s) -
Alice Magdalena Bodoc
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
bulletin of the "transilvania" university of braşov. series iv, philology and cultural studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2066-7698
pISSN - 2066-768X
DOI - 10.31926/but.pcs.2020.62.13.1.3
Subject(s) - romanian , phenomenon , linguistics , verb , adverbial , action (physics) , agency (philosophy) , computer science , sociology , epistemology , philosophy , social science , physics , quantum mechanics
Starting from Alanen’s remark that “actions (exercises of capacities) are found throughout the natural world; and so is agency” (2018, 2), the present paper aims at describing the influence of these two fundamental concepts – action and agency – on the structure of Romanian complex sentences. More precisely, I am interested in providing evidence of a linguistic phenomenon that has received far less attention in the literature, i.e. the semantic restrictions imposed by the matrix verb over the embedded adverbial clause. As concerns the methodology, both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted on an extensive online Romanian corpus (CoRoLa), and will be based on the semantic typologies of the verb included in some of the reference Romanian grammars (GALR 2008, 326; GBLR 2010, 279). One of the most important results of the analysis was the phenomenon of agentivity