Transpositions in Middle Literary Armenian
Transpositions in Middle Literary Armenian
Shahverdyan Tereza
Summary
Key words: linguistic levels, synonymous grammatical constructions, morphological stylistics, syntactic metaphors, reinterpretations of negative, incomplete and complete, simple and compound, intonationally differentiated sentences
Both morphological and syntactic stylistics in Middle Armenian exhibit their own distinctive systems of expressive and figurative representation. At the core of these phenomena lies a stylistic-linguistic process known as reinterpretation or grammatical metaphor. One of its manifestations is the effective use of diverse synonymous grammatical units – different formal structures expressing the same or similar semantic content.
Synonymy has predominantly been studied at the lexical level, focusing on the semantic commonalities and functional nuances of synonymous words. In the case of morphological metaphors, grammatical forms are employed within paradigmatic oppositions.
At the syntactic level, incomplete synonymous constructions are often used in place of complete compound sentences. In such cases, although the primary or sometimes even secondary sentence constituents may be absent in the expression plane, their semantic content is fully perceived.
Affirmative and negative sentences form a syntactic paradigm in which negative constructions may convey affirmation, and affirmative ones may imply negation.
Also of interest is the paradigm of declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences differentiated by intonation. Each possesses unique grammatical features and usage patterns, yet frequently, they function metaphorically – substituting one another in terms of syntactic role.