SOUNDS OF THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE

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Phonetic aspects (in connection with semantic aspects) in phrases with double subject in the Romanian Language

You can listen to the phrases with double subject here.

      The semantic arguments of the predicate can be sometimes doubled by cyclic pronouns. This aspect is very frequent in the case of direct and indirect objects, but sometimes it appears also with the subject (not only in the Romanian language, as [Masahiro, 1996] shows). The double subject is a controversial linguistic phenomenon in the Romanian language: Alexandra Cornilescu [Cornilescu, 1997] brought forward the double subject problematic, Verginica Barbu [Barbu, 2003] tried to mold it using the tool offered by the HPSG, but till today it does not exists an universal treatment, especially from the phonological perspective (what supplementary information, from a descriptive point of view, brings the pronunciation in a construction with double subject).
      Examples of constructions with double subject are:

      a) *Mother, she is coming! (Vine ea mama!)
      b) *Passed he has thus a time. ("A trecut el aşa un răstimp", (M. Sadoveanu))
      c) *He would know, someone, how to solve this. (O şti el careva cum să rezolve asta.)
      d) *Mother is coming she also later. (Mama vine şi ea mai târziu.)
      e) *Mother, she knows what she is doing. (Mama ştie ea ce face.)
      f) Does he really know what he is doing? (Chiar ştie el ce face?)

      The constructions from d)-f) are considered by some linguists sentences with proper double subject, and by others, like Cornilescu, language particular structures.
      In this context, we aim to record a set of sentences with double and simple subject, for a comparative analysis of the prosody in those two types of phrases, as well as to detect the implied modifications induced by the double subject in comparison with the double subject. The sentences are recorded with neutral tone, but also with particular pronunciations, such as the accentuation of the pronoun which represents the subject duplication, the accentuation of the word following the pronoun, or developing the sentence. We are trying to account for a correlation between semantic charge of the phrases with double subject and their pronunciation. A further development would be the determination of the part of the double subject which is more accentuated and the conditions in which one or other from two subjects becomes more accentuated, eventually according to the emotional charge.

The prosody of double subject sentences

Publications in domain:

[Cornilescu, 1997] Cornilescu A., "The Double Subject Construction in Romanian. Notes on the Syntax of the Subject", "Revue Roumaine de Linguistique", no. 3-4, 1997
[Masahiro, 1996] Masahiro Oku, "Analyzing Japanese double-subject construction having an adjective predicate", "Proceedings of the 16^th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2", Copenhagen, Denmark, Pages: 865 - 870, 1996
[Barbu, 2003] Verginica Barbu, "Construcţii cu subiect dublu în limba româna actuală. O perspectivă HPSG", in the volume "Aspecte ale dinamicii limbii române actuale", second volume, University Printing House Bucureşti, pp. 73-79, 2003