| Abstrakt: |
It is a mere fact nowadays that linguistic loans are progressively adopted by a great amount of native Romanian speakers. Facing this reality, linguists tend to respond either by accepting the fatality of influence or by attempting to reject the entire process, turning language into a battle field of such extreme ideas as imposing laws against excessive linguistic borrowings. Even the middle path that was taken by researchers since 1990 (the reference point for the linguistic boom of English words in Romanian language, a boom that currently affects our floating communicational standards) relies on extralinguistic criteria such as necessity or futility, linguistic trends or linguistic supremacy, political correctness or cultural decadence, mass colonization or snobbery. Nevertheless, these criteria do not exclude a well-balanced statistical analysis, a moderate tone, and a dual perspective that, in the end, brings forth the intrinsic speakers' motivations along to their extrinsic ones. Under these circumstances, our paper discusses the influence that English loanwords bring upon the communicational level of contemporary Romanian language. Namely, we focus on two loanwords (target and hostess), as well as on a semantic calque (ospitalitate - hospitality), in order to grasp the hidden complexity entailed in the process of linguistic globalization. Our explanatory endeavour integrates the corpus within the conceptual frame of normative grammar, lexicology, and semantics. Generally speaking, we illustrate how particular lexical-semantic phenomena, namely calques and barbarisms, may generate discourse trends and, moreover, communicational patterns or habits which, in time, become vectors indicating more or less dramatic linguistic changes. From a lexical and semantic perspective, these shifts are a sign of creativity and dynamics. From a normative perspective, they show some points of vulnerability regarding the communicational dimension of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
