Valori discursive ale marcatorului epistemic într-adevăr în limba română. O perspectivă diacronică

DISCURSIVE VALUES OF THE EPISTEMIC MARKER ÎNTR-ADEVĂR [IN TRUTH/INDEED] IN ROMANIAN. A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE Abstract The paper aimed to provide a diachronic analysis of the epistemic marker într-adevăr [in truth/indeed] in Romanian, based on a corpus that encompasses representative literary texts from the early XVIth century to modern times. Comprising the word “truth”, which metalinguistically refers to the propositional truth of the utterance, this adverbial phrase is theoretically one of the stronger certainty markers. Therefore, its occurrences in sententious biblical formulae are unsurprising: the first Romanian texts, translations of the New Testament books, capture a testimonial and verdictive use. In the legal text, într-adevăr has preponderantly an evidential value. In historiographical texts, reference to the truth is a strategy for legitimizing the moral authority of the writer to record the official facts. Truth is related to the construction of ethos, with the writer describing himself as an accurate witness and an honest chronicler. Accordingly, the modal particle had a rhetorical function (booster marker). The modern use of the marker preserves the epistemic and rhetorical values, adding polyphonic, argumentative, narrative, confirmative, and metadiscursive functions. These new values are less due to an internal evolution and more to an external influence of Romanian by translations, mainly from French, Italian, or English. The new values have enriched the discursive profile of the epistemic modal marker, transforming it into one of the most prolific discourse markers/connectors in Romanian written texts. Statistical analysis based on corpora confirms the bookish profile of the discourse marker într-adevăr, which is rarely used in the oral register of the language.