Figement et grammaticalisation dans l’expression era să spun / să zic ‘j’allais dire’ en roumain

Abstract

The article deals with the relation between lexicalization and grammaticalization in the pragmatic phraseological unit era să spun / să zic ‘I was going to say’ in Romanian. The analysis of its syntactic configurations and that of its semantic-pragmatic interpretations, as they appear in two contemporary corpora (CoRoLa and Romanian Web 2016), provide elements for an approach to the emergence of the metalinguistic marker era să spun / să zic. It is the avertive use (something is about to happen without this happening) of the structure “era + subjunctive of the verb a spune / a zice” that is at the origin of its metalinguistic discursive use: by avoiding saying something which has nevertheless been said the speaker intends to comment on his/her own discourse.

Keywords

• lexicalization
• grammaticalization
• era să spun / să zic
• metalinguistic marker
• avertive meaning