Verbs of speaking and thinking as linking elements in italian text

Abstract

This article discusses Italian and Russian verbs of thinking and speaking using approximately 400 examples that were collected during the study of original fiction texts in the two languages and their translations. The main goal is to identify the elements of Italian text that may seem superfluous to a Russian speaker and to determine their textual function. In the case of verbs of speaking, we focus on constructions using direct speech and on interpretative verbs such as ‘mentire’ and ‘insistere’ that have different ways of generating content valence with a propositional actant. We also examine emotive verbs that are often used with a supplementary predicate of mental semantics. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it tries for the first time to define the contexts of use of such predicates and to study their degree of obligatoriness/optionality and the reasons for their inclusion in a phrase. We show that the elements of this mode are, on the whole, more fully expressed in the Italian text than in the Russian text, where they tend to be completely or partially reduced, pointing to the existence of different strategies of conceptualizing and linguistically coding elements of cognitive structure in the two languages. The conclusions have clear practical significance, as the studied phenomena relate to the domain of collective language use, whose knowledge will help foreign speakers to avoid interference with their native language.