CONTRASTIVE TYPOLOGY OF VERBAL CONSTRUCTIONSIN FRENCH AND ROMANIAN: THE CASE OF THE VERB FR. DONNER / ROM. A DA

Abstract

The article analyzes, from a French–Romanian contrastive perspective, verbal constructions formed with the verb donner and its Romanian equivalent a da in order to determine their productivity, degree of fixedness, and phraseological extension. On the basis of several formal, semantic, and pragmatic criteria (the semantic status of the verb as a full verb or a light verb, the syntactic status of its arguments, literal or figurative interpretation, and the nature of determiners), we propose a distinction between three sub-classes of verbal constructions: verbal collocations, verbal idioms, and fixed expressions. A subsequent contrastive analysis aims to show how the verb Fr. donner / Rom. a da, as a polysemous pivot, modulates meaning across the three types of verbal constructions, while highlighting the phraseological and cultural specificities of the two languages.