The Preposition-Opposeme of the Romanian Substantival Non-Ts

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to prove that, in the Romanian language, at the intrapropositional level, the preposition/prepositional phrase can actualize two hypostases: preposition-relateme, marking the presence of relational meaning, vs preposition-opposeme, marking the absence of relational meaning, depending on the syntactic position in which it occurs alongside certain parts of speech with the status of lexemes, our analysis focusing on the substantival class: structural syntactic position of the type part of sentence and syntactical function, whatever these are, vs. non-structural syntactic position. Apposition or – as it is accepted, from a didactic point of view, by the Cluj-based neotraditional relational School of Grammar with which our research is affiliated – real apposition, by contrast with false apposition, is considered by G. G. Neamţu to be a non-structural syntactic position of the parenthetic or explanatory type, a peculiar syntactic phenomenon, which cannot be relationally subsumed through either coordination or subordination; in other words, it is a syntactical non-function or a non-Ts, regardless of the part of speech through which it is expressed. The placement of the preposition/prepositional phrase in front of the apposition does not change the non-relational context in which the latter is found (it becomes a preposition-opposeme and the apposition remains a non-Ts) or the casual substantival regime of this morphological value; it imposes, in the case of the substantival class that follows it (since Romanian is an inflected language), one of three possible cases – the accusative, the genitive or the dative. In the absence of the preposition/prepositional phrase, the flective of the substantival apposition represents, in its entirety, an opposeme (a unit of expression without a relational sense), a flective-opposeme, as the expression of the grammatical categories of opposition, implicitly, and the case, a flective-opposeme of case, the latter existing in a dichotomy with the flective-relateme of case, which may be actualized in certain syntactic structural positions of the type part of sentence and syntactic function, in the absence of the preposition-relateme.