Ediția bilingvă a lui Johann Ignaz von Felbiger „Ducere de mână către cinste și direptate, adecă la copii rumuneştii neuniții cei ce în şcole cele mici să învață spre cetanie rănduită carte”, Viena, 1777. (II)

Predicatul, numele predicativ și argumentele verbului

Abstract

The present paper constitutes the second part of the author’s study entitled The Bilingual Edition of Johann Ignaz von Felbiger, Ducere de mână către cinste și direptate, adecă la copii rumuneştii neuniții cei ce în şcole cele mici să învață spre cetanie rănduită carte”, Vienna, 1777 (I): Cultural Context and Morphological Observations, published in Helsinki Romanian Studies Journal, no. 3, 2025 (https://doi.org/10.31885/her.1.3.016).

While the first study describes aspects pertaining to the cultural context of the book’s publication and its morphological particularities, the present article continues with an analysis of linguistic phenomena specific to sentence and clause syntax.

Following a brief introduction outlining the research methodology and the principal reference works, the second and third sections examine the verbal predicate and the predicative complement as constitutive elements of the complex predicate. These sections address aspects of their formal realisation, issues of agreement, the ellipsis of the verbal predicate or the copulative operator, as well as word order. The examples provided are numerous and varied, drawing on the entire text in order to offer a comprehensive account of how these syntactic functions were manifested in Old Romanian.

The fourth part of the study focuses on the verb’s arguments, providing a syntactic analysis thereof. These include the subject, the direct object, the prepositional complement, and the indirect object, all examined from the perspective of their formal realisation within the sentence and the clause, as well as their frequency of use. Furthermore, less common grammatical features, that were in decline or on the verge of disappearing during the second half of the eighteenth century are identified.  Several characteristics of the agent complement, the secondary complement, and the internal complement are also presented. Although fewer examples of these are attested, they remain significant for understanding their usage in the period. As the work under analysis is a translation and the study is based on a Romanian–German bilingual edition, several sentences from the German original are transcribed in order to illustrate syntactic calques or to clarify certain unusual linguistic features.

In the final section, several syntactic conclusions are formulated, derived from the analysis of a significant number of examples from the bilingual edition by Johann Ignaz von Felbiger.