Abstract
The present paper analyses lexical imitation and creation in contemporary Romanian, as two important processes of developing the individual and collective lexis, along with the various forms of borrowing and the internal lexical-grammatical techniques of vocabulary enrichment. Setting the perimeter of the investigation entails: 1) clarifying the two concepts and, due to the complexity of the phenomena and the diversity of occurrences both in the specialised language, in the non-specialized language, as well as in the colloquial and argotic language, a typological approach will follow. The subsequent objective 2) consists in the identification and description of the lexical-semantic mechanisms involved in lexical imitation and creation. Furthermore, as lexical imitation and lexical creation are substantial sources of expressiveness, my endeavour also involves 3) studying their special role in the dynamics of the slang, depending on the degree of communicational complicity determined by such special lexical items. The accomplishment of these objectives requires a chiefly linguistic methodology and the instruments used pertain mainly to the semantic and lexical-paradigmatic patterns of analysis. Given the necessity of considering the context, the discursive parameters and the quantification of the expressiveness of the argotic terms, the present investigation will require instruments of pragma-stylistics and sociolinguistics analysis.
Highlights
The clarification of the conceptsThe special status of Romanian as the only representative language of Latinity in Eastern Europe has secured, in time, an important place for itself in the specialized literature
The permanent integration of lexical creations into the language is much more probable given their almost invariable expressiveness, the contexts in which they are placed are descriptive-connotative
If beyond the organicist stance of this assertion we perceive the two stages as being recursive in the dynamics of languages, the phenomenon of imitation is more characteristic of the accumulation stages of a language, whereas lexical creation can be associated with the stages of language processing through culture
Summary
The special status of Romanian as the only representative language of Latinity in Eastern Europe has secured, in time, an important place for itself in the specialized literature. This is frequently seen with words for animals, which can be used tot refer to people negatively or insultigly, as when someone is called a monkey, parasite, pig, sow, and so on In poetic language, such creations (which can be transfers with material expression) are dominant, they are obtained in various ways and they can be based on mechanisms and associations which are sometimes difficult to detect. 247); in this case the forced analogy with audiență (audience) as if it were formed by adding the suffix –ență, it is a neologism (originating from the French word audience); the Romanian noun audience (having the initial meaning of “meeting granted to an applicant by a person in a high position”) has recently added the meaning of audience from English by semantic calque;. The permanent integration of lexical creations into the language (and, their inclusion in dictionaries) is much more probable given their almost invariable expressiveness, the contexts in which they are placed are descriptive-connotative (generally involving occasional connotations regarded as mere possibilities and not connotations which are deeply rooted into the language and which characterize the lexeme in its entirety, as in the case of polysemy, for example)
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