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This study aims at exploring the affective and lexico-semantic content of the most frequent unadapted English loanwords and their Croatian equivalents. Valence, arousal, familiarity, and concreteness ratings were collected for 391 English loanwords and 524 Croatian equivalents: 286 in context equivalents, 146 out-of-context equivalents, and 92 adapted forms. Ratings were collected via online questionnaires from 678 native Croatian speakers, and are available in the ENGRI CROWD database, the first such database for English loanwords (Bogunović et al., 2022). Potential differences in ratings between English loanwords and the three types of equivalents were examined with Paired sample ttests. The difference between valence ratings for English loanwords and in-context equivalents was not significant. In-context equivalents scored higher than English loanwords on emotionality, familiarity and concreteness, while the opposite was found for arousal. Out-of-context equivalents scored higher than English loanwords on valence, emotionality, familiarity and concreteness, but not on arousal. Adapted forms scored lower than English loanwords on valence, emotionality and familiarity, while the difference for arousal and concreteness was not significant. The results suggest that Croatian speakers perceive English loanwords as less emotional, less familiar and less concrete than Croatian equivalents, but more arousing. This supports the view that L2 vocabulary is less embodied than L1 vocabulary (Imbault et al., 2021). The arousal ratings can be explained by the exposure to English through media, in which the content is predominantly arousing. Finally, adapted forms were rated as the least positive, emotional, familiar and concrete, which reflects their marginal status in Croatian. |
