Romanian de fapt - from an adjectival adjunct to an attention marker

Cezar Bălășoiu

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.156

Abstract

This research traces back the development of the Romanian phrase de fapt (‘in fact, actually, indeed’), based on written and oral corpora. De fapt has been attested in Romanian since late 19th century; chronologically, it is the last of the three Romanian adverbial expressions (alongside în faptă and în fapt) that went through all the stages of the grammaticalization cline proposed by Elizabeth Traugott for this type of adverbs. However, we consider that this phrase actually goes even further by becoming, in press headlines, an attention marker (Fraser 2009: 297), thus joining the category of să vezi ce s-a întâmplat (‘you won’t believe what has happened’). Thus, in press titles such as Cu ce femeie a petrecut aseară Pepe, de fapt (‘Who is the woman Pepe actually spent the evening with’), de fapt loses its contrastive discourse marker rhetorical function of contrasting with a previous element and acquires a new function, i.e. of inviting the reader to read a story that (s)he would have otherwise overlooked. In this type of occurrences, de fapt acquires, for the first time, an intersubjective value.

Highlights

This research traces back the development of the Romanian phrase de fapt (‘’), based on written and oral corpora
The papers that diachronically discuss the Fr. de fait, en fait or the Engl. highlight a three-stage evolution, in which the adverbial phrase moves from being an internal adverb to being a sentential adverb and, a discourse markers (DM), with a wider scope aiming at a three-element sequence:
DMs are a class of pragmatic markers, the latter being identified as linguistic signals related to “non-propositional part of sentence meaning” and “linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” (Fraser 1996: 323)

Summary

Preliminaries

Discourse markers (DM) have been constantly addressed to by the specialised literature. The French forms de fait, en fait, au fait, en effet (Danjou-Flaux 1980; Rossari 1990, 1992a, 1992b; Blumenthal 1996; Savelli 2001; Forsgren 2009; Saunier 2017; Wandel 2017), the English and (Oh 2000; Taglicht 2001; Mladenovici Ionescu 2020) and the Italian infatti (Brutti 1999; Sergo 2015), to quote just a few, have been synchronically examined (and subject to an intralinguistic comparison on several levels) They were diachronically approached, so as to check the hypothesis proposed by Traugott 1982 or Traugott 1997 related to the grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of several adverbs, while highlighting the particularities of their evolution, (: Traugott 1997, 1999; Schwenter & Traugott 2000; Traugott & Dasher 2002, de hecho: Fanego 2010, au fait, de fait, en fait: D’Hondt 2014).

The theoretical framework

Diachronic overview

The current status of the de fapt DM

De fapt – attention marker

Conclusions