EQUIVALENTS OF PHRASE, CLAUSE AND SENTENCE IN FRENCH AND ALBANIAN
EQUIVALENTS OF PHRASE, CLAUSE AND SENTENCE IN FRENCH AND ALBANIAN

Summary/Abstract: The Albanian speakers and learners using the roman grammar terminology are facing a conceptual discrepancy and difficulty in translating the word ‘clause’ in their native language, considering its Anglo-Saxon terminology origin. In fact, the only word holding the meaning of the sentence in Albanian syntax is the word Fjalia, and consecutively there a Simple, Extended and Composed Sentence. Till here things are similar and very clear, but the troubles of the students begin when they meet the word ‘clause’, which is formally bigger than the English phrase or French Syntagma, but smaller than the Sentence, as described above. Both clause and sentence have the common feature of having within it a lexical verb, which meets the required criteria for being a syntactic category bigger than phrase. But one of them is called clause, even though the clause must be a part of a sentence in the same time, because clause cannot stay alone and doesn’t end by an orthographic stop point, as the sentence does. On the other hand a Simple sentence my have only one lexical verb, together with the subject, and the Extended sentence may have only one lexical verb in the function of the predicater, plus at least one of other sentence elements, whereas a Sentence must have more than one lexical verb, which means it must consist of two or more clauses, or otherwise called it must be composed, either compound or complex. Mathematically said, we must deal with two clauses in order to call it a sentence, even though the sentence may consist of one lexical verb in Simple and Extended sentences, but this is not the case with the clause. Therefore, there are difficulties of translation because of their common semantic meaning on the one hand and their different orthographic and syntactical use on the other hand. How to translate the word Clause which is something in the source language that doesn’t exist even as a phenomenon in the target language?! We may invent a name according to the way of use, but it cannot be equivalent for the native language of the foreigner. We may paraphrase it and explain with other words, but not with a specific one, even though there have been some attempts, like ‘‘sifjali’, or ‘‘fjalizë’’, but this is not good enough. Or we may just borrow the word and naturalize it phonetically as Klauzë, but even then we cannot naturalize it semantically? What to do then? This is in fact the challenge of this paper, hoping to succeed, but not necessarily.

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