Indices of linguistic presentation in Romanian texts of the sixteenth century

Abstract

The paper aims to identify certain markers of the semantic-pragmatic category of linguistic presentation in the Romanian documents and records of the 16^th century. The theoretical framework consists of Discourse Analysis and Functional Grammar. The analysis points out that the texts discussed comprise a rich inventory of forms by means of which the semantic-pragmatic category of presentation is realised and which are adapted to the specifics of legal and administrative communication. The study identifies literary presentative interjections, characteristic of written language (adecă, iată ‘here (is)’); uite (‘look, lo, see’). For allocutive formations, the predominant functions are identity presentation and identification (similar to the initial, “demonstrative” value of presentatives, recorded for older periods), which are directly related to the objectives of the studied documents (as opposed to Modern Romanian, in which the citational, argumentative and focalising functions of presentatives are dominant). In non-allocutive formations, one can notice the multifunctionality of the verb a fi (‘to be’) for presentative meanings.