FLOATING PREDICATE – WHY AN EXCLUSIVELY ACADEMIC APPROACH IN ROMANIAN LANGUAGE?

Cipriana-Elena Macaveiu - Peica, Romania, ID CLEaR2016-364;     After 1990, the study of the Romanian language in middle school and high school has suffered many changes; the principle underlying the school curricula and textbooks was to step away from the theorising academicism and turn to the functional practice of the language. Although the teaching/learning of Romanian was meant to respond to a growing number of requirements of real life by improving verbal communication of pupils and students, the reality of recent years, reflected both in the results of academic exams at national level and in the oral and written expression of pupils and students, indicates a clear failure which can be explained, in our view, by the faulty theoretical and practical approach of the Romanian language in school textbooks and auxiliaries. Another drawback is that school textbooks and curricula avoid a number of grammatical problems, some of them considered to be too difficult (e.g. floating predicate), and this often creates confusion, most questions remain unanswered in school textbooks and teaching auxiliaries and, consequently, only a certain type of texts/exercises/tests are approached in school textbooks and teaching auxiliaries. We consider this approach to be wrong because logical arguments can be understood by students at this age, proof of this being their ability to understand, for example, problems and exercises in mathematics, physics, chemistry which have a high degree of difficulty. These are the main reasons why I have decided to address the floating predicate issue in this paper which includes, on the one hand, the theoretical framework, with the authors’ opinions on the floating predicate and the grounds underlying them, in an attempt to shape a general picture of the topic that we are addressing, and on the other hand the manner in which this floating predicate, often so easily and wrongly labelled as ‘adverbials of place’, could be theorised and reinstated.

Key-words: floating predicate, predicative complement, school grammar, adverbials of place, direct object.