1887
  1. Home
  2. e-Journals
  3. Pragmatics & Cognition
  4. Volume 25, Issue 1
  5. Article
Volume 25, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-0907
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9943
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Abstract

In the context of the current heated debate surrounding the pervasive influence of the English language and Anglo-American culture on other languages, as well as the widespread purist attitude towards some contact-induced language change phenomena, both abroad and in Romania, our article discusses the situation of English lexical borrowings in present-day Romanian, focusing on the perception and processing of the so-called (Sections 2 and 3) by young Romanian native speakers, in an attempt to see whether such an analysis can help clarify their acceptability and diffusion across our target population. We propose an alternative cognitive, psycholinguistic approach to the study of contact-induced lexical borrowings, aiming to show that there is no difference in the young Romanian native speakers’ processing of sentences containing luxury Anglicisms and their established Romanian counterparts. Such findings may support our claim that the acceptability and diffusion of such Anglicisms are pervasive across our target population, even if the official position generally condemns such uses, considering them gratuitous and a burden in communication, even making it unintelligible sometimes.

Our analysis starts from the observation that most (but not all) Romanian academics, whether linguists or not, tend to embrace a purist attitude, while on the other hand young Romanians accept such Anglicisms and tend to use them extensively. In fact, such uses are not limited to young people, who have been the subjects of our research, but are the ‘norm’ in daily conversations and elsewhere across the general population (Stoichițoiu Ichim 2006). Thus, there seems to be a gap between the actual acceptability and diffusion of luxury Anglicisms among Romanians and the ‘official’ recommendations. Based on the results of a sensicality task, meant to show how 188 Romanians, aged 18–22, process and perceive sentences with or without luxury Anglicisms (see Section 6), we will try to show that luxury Anglicisms are accepted and, by recurrent use, diffused among the Romanian community. For a more accurate picture of their diffusion, the findings will be further correlated with data from , the only official corpus of present-day Romanian (beginning 1989) made available under the auspices of the Romanian Academy, as well as a corpus currently in the making, and the Internet (see Section 7).

Besides showing that luxury Anglicisms cannot really be blamed for burdening or impairing processing, and thus communication, and explaining why such uses should not be censured or disapproved, we hope that our study of acceptability and diffusion will demonstrate that we are dealing with a complex, multi-layered phenomenon that can be better understood by going beyond a diachronic and synchronic analysis of particular words and a frequency count, and should incorporate more experimental data.

Last but not least, we suggest that, on the practical side, such experimental studies as the one described here could be used as an additional criterion for the lexicographic inclusion of lexical borrowings.

© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
2019-06-12
2024-12-08

  • From This Site

    /content/journals/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
    dcterms_title,dcterms_subject,pub_keyword
    -contentType:Journal -contentType:Contributor -contentType:Concept -contentType:Institution
    10
    5
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Androutsopoulos, Jannis
    2012 English ‘on top’: Discourse functions of English resources in the German mediascape. Sociolinguistic Studies6(2). 209–238.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Assche, Eva van , Wouter Duyck & Robert J. Hartsuiker
    2016 Context effects in bilingual sentence processing: Task specificity. In Roberto R. Heredia , Jeanette Altarriba & Anna B. Cieślicka (eds.). Methods in bilingual reading comprehension research, 11–31. New York: Springer. 10.1007/978‑1‑4939‑2993‑1_2
     https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2993-1_2 [Google Scholar]
  3. Avram, Mioara
    1997 Anglicismele în limba română actuală. [Anglicisms in present-day Romanian]. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
  4. Berthele, Raphaele
    2015 Googling Toubon: Testing the effects of institutional French language purism. In Jocelyne Daems , Eline Zenner , Kris Heylen , Dirk Speelman & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Change of paradigms – New paradoxes: Recontextualizing language and linguistics, 275–293. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, retrieved fromdoc.rero.ch/record/257662on1August 2018.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Cenac, Oana Magdalena
    2004 Anglicismele în sistemul financiar-bancar românesc [Anglicisms in the Romanian financial and banking system]. Analele Universității Dunărea de Jos Galați [The Annals of the University Dunărea de Jos Galați] 13. 36–41.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Chesley, Paula & Harald R. Baayen
    2010 Predicting new words from newer words: Lexical borrowing in French. Linguistics48(4). 1343–1374.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Ciobanu, Georgeta
    2006 Dinamica adaptării elementului englez în limba română [The dynamics of assimilation of the English element in Romanian]. In Marius Sala (ed.), Studii de gramatică şi de formarea cuvintelor. În memoria Mioarei Avram [Grammar and word formation studies. In memory of Mioara Avram], 57–67. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Constantinescu, Ilinca , Victoria Popovici & Ariadna Ștefănescu
    2002 Romanian. In Manfred Görlach (ed.), English in Europe, 168–194. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Croitor, Blanca , Andreea Dinică , Adina Dragomirescu , Isabela Nedelcu , Irina Nicula , Alexandru Nicolae , Carmen Vasile , Marina Rădulescu Sala & Rodica Zafiu
    2008 Eşti cool şi dacă vorbeşti corect [You are cool even if you speak correctly]. Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic Gold.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Crystal, David
    2003 English as a global language, 2nd edn.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511486999
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486999 [Google Scholar]
  11. Dworkin, Steven N.
    2012 A History of the Spanish lexicon: A linguistic perspective. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541140.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541140.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  12. Étiemble, René
    1964 Parlez-vous franglais? [Do you speak franglais?]. Paris: Gallimard.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Fischer, Roswitha & Hanna Pułaczewska
    2008 Anglicisms in Europe: Linguistic diversity in a global context. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Furiassi, Cristiano , Virginia Pulcini & Félix Rodríguez González
    (eds) 2012 The Anglicization of European lexis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 10.1075/z.174
     https://doi.org/10.1075/z.174 [Google Scholar]
  15. Furiassi, Cristiano & Henrik Gottlieb
    (eds.) 2015 Pseudo-English: Studies on false Anglicisms in Europe. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9781614514688
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614514688 [Google Scholar]
  16. Geeraerts, Dirk
    2016 Entrenchment as onomasiological salience. In Hans-Jörg Schmid (ed.), Entrenchment and the psychology of language learning: How we reorganize and adapt linguistic knowledge (Language and the Human Lifespan Series), 153–174. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Görlach, Manfred
    (ed.) 2001 A dictionary of European anglicisms: A usage dictionary of anglicisms in sixteen European languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. (ed.) 2002 English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Guilbert, Louis
    1975 La creativité lexicale [Lexical creativity]. Paris: Larousse.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Guiraud, Pierre
    1965 Les mots étrangers [Foreign words]. Paris: P.U.F.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Hristea, Theodor
    1995 Ortografia și ortoepia neologismelor românești (cu specială referire la împrumuturile recente) [The correct spelling and pronunciation of Romanian neologisms (with special reference to recent loanwords)]. Limbă și literatură [Language and literature] XL(2). 36–53.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Jaworski, Sylwester
    2014 Contact-induced changes in Polish morphology. In Amei Koll-Stobbe & Sebastian Knospe (eds.), Language contact around the Globe: Proceedings of the LCTG3 conference, 25–45. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Konieczna, Ewa
    2012 Lexical blending in Polish: A result of the internationalisation of Slavic languages. In Vincent Renner , François Maniez , & Pierre J. L. Arnaud (eds.), Cross-disciplinary perspectives on lexical blending, 51–73. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9783110289572.51
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110289572.51 [Google Scholar]
  24. Levinson, Stephen C.
    2000 Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge/Mass. & London: The MIT Press. 10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  25. Myers-Scotton, Carol
    2002 Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198299530.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198299530.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  26. Niculescu-Gorpin, Anabella-Gloria
    2013 Influenţe cultural-lingvistice asupra evoluţiei recente a limbii române în context european şi mondial [Cultural and linguistic influences on the recent evolution of the Romanian language in a European and worldwide context]. Bucharest: Editura Muzeului Naţional al Literaturii Române.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. 2014 Use and abuse of borrowings in the Romanian print media. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique [Romanian Review of Linguistics] LIX(4). 91–102.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Niculescu-Gorpin, Anabella-Gloria & Monica Vasileanu
    2016a Romanian lexical Anglicisms: Norms and usage, speakers’ attitudes and official recommendations. Romania OrientaleXXIX. 57–67.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. 2016b How speaker attitudes are changing present-day Romanian: A socio-linguistic overview, presented atICS-1 – The 1st International Conference on Sociolinguistics: Insights from Superdiversity, Complexity and Multimodality, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, September 1–3, 2016.
  30. 2017 Perception and processing of context-dependent Anglicisms across the age groups (extended abstract). In Valerie Hazan (ed.), SPPL 2017 – Workshop on Speech Perception and Production across the Lifespan (University College London, 26–27 April 2017), 84–86. sppl2017.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SPPL2017_book-of-abstracts.pdf (1December 2017.)
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Onysko, Alexander
    2009 Divergence with a cause? The systemic integration of anglicisms in German as an indication of the intensity of language contact. In Falco Pfalzgraf (ed.), Englischer Sprachkontakt in den Varietäten des Deutschen/English in contact with varieties of German, 53–74. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Peter Lang.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Onysko, Alexander & Esme Winter-Froemel
    2011 Necessary loans – luxury loans? Exploring the pragmatic dimension of borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics43(6). 1550–1567. 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.12.004
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.12.004 [Google Scholar]
  33. Otheguy, Ricardo & Ana Celia Zentella
    2012 Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. New York: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199737406.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199737406.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  34. Pacea, Otilia
    2005 Neologismele comunicării electronice. Studiu de caz [Neologisms in electronic communication]. Studii și Cercetări Lingvistice [Linguistic Studies and Research] LVI (1–2). 191–198.
     [Google Scholar]
  35. Petuhov, Nicoleta
    2002 Influenţa engleză asupra limbii române actuale: Terminologia publicitară [English influence on present-day Romanian: Advertising terminology]. Limba Română [Romanian Language] LI(1–3). 27–35.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Pulcini, Virginia
    1994 The English language in Italy. English Today40(10). 49–52. 10.1017/S0266078400007914
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400007914 [Google Scholar]
  37. Pușcariu, Sextil
    1940 Limba română: Privire generală [The Romanian language: An overview]. Bucharest: Fundația pentru literatură și artă Regele Carol I.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Rodriguez Gonzalez, Felix
    1999 Anglicisms in contemporary Spanish. An overview. AtlantisXXI. 103–139.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Rohde, Ada , Anatol Stefanowitsch & Suzanne Kemmer
    1999 Loanwords in a usage-based model. In Sabrina J. Billings , John P. Boyle & Aaron M. Griffith (eds.), Papers from the Thirty-Fifth Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Part 1: Papers from the Main Session, 265–275. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
     [Google Scholar]
  40. Roig-Marín, Amanda
    2017 The Anglicisation of word formations: Cross-linguistic blends in Spanish. English Today33(4). 50–56. doi:  10.1017/S0266078416000614 (20December 2017).
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078416000614 [Google Scholar]
  41. Sala-Rădulescu, Marina
    2007 Despre adaptarea unor anglicisme în limba română [On the assimilation of some Anglicisms in Romanian]. Studii și Cercetări Lingvistice [Linguistic studies and research] LVIII(1). 175–185.
     [Google Scholar]
  42. Sánchez-Casas, Rosa & José García-Albea
    2005 The representation of cognate and non-cognate words in bilingual memory: Can cognate status be characterized as a special kind of morphological relation?In Judith F. Kroll & Annette M. B. de Groot (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, 226–250. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  43. Saugera, Valérie
    2017 Remade in France: Anglicisms in the lexicon and morphology of French. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625542.001.0001
     https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625542.001.0001 [Google Scholar]
  44. Șimon, Simona
    2016 Necessary and luxury English loanwords in some Romanian online newspapers and magazines. In Daniel Dejica , Gyde Hansen , Peter Sandrini & Iulia Para (eds.), Language in the digital era: Challenges and perspectives, 29–36. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (15December 2017) 10.1515/9783110472059‑005
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110472059-005 [Google Scholar]
  45. Slama-Cazacu, Tatiana
    2000 Stratageme comunicaționale și manipularea [Communicative strategies and manipulation]. Iași: Polirom.
     [Google Scholar]
  46. Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson
    1986/1995 Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd rev. edn.Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
     [Google Scholar]
  47. Squires, Nick
    2017 Italian is under assault from rising number of Anglicisms, sloppy use of verbs and shrinking vocabulary, guardians of the language warn. The Telegraph, 17.01.2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/17/italian-assault-rising-number-anglicisms-sloppy-use-verbs-shrinking/ (1 December 2017)
     [Google Scholar]
  48. Stoichițoiu Ichim, Adriana
    2001 Vocabularul limbii romane actuale: dinamică, influență, creativitate [The vocabulary of present-day Romanian: Dynamics, influences, creativity]. Bucharest: Editura ALL.
     [Google Scholar]
  49. 2006 Aspecte ale influenței engleze în româna actuală [Features of the English influence in present-day Romanian]. Bucharest: Editura Universității din Bucharest.
     [Google Scholar]
  50. Tappolet, Ernst
    1913 Die alemannischen Lehnwörter in den Mundarten der französischen Schweiz [Alemmanic loanwords in the dialects of French Switzerland]. Basel: Universitäts-Buchdruckerei Friedrich Reinhardt.
     [Google Scholar]
  51. Thody, Philip Malcolm Waller , Howard Evans & Michelle Pepratx-Evans
    1995 Le Franglais: Forbidden English, forbidden American: Law, politics, and language in contemporary France: A study in loan words and national identity. London, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone.
     [Google Scholar]
  52. Topală, Dragoş Vlad
    2006 Aspecte morfologice ale anglicismelor din limba română actuală (genul şi numărul) [Morphological features of Anglicisms in present-day Romanian: gender and number]. In Marius Sala (ed.). Studii de gramatică şi de formarea cuvintelor. În memoria Mioarei Avram [Grammar and word formation studies. In memory of Mioara Avram], 425–433. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
     [Google Scholar]
  53. Vakareliyska, Cynthia M. & Vsevolod Kapatsinski
    2014 An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian. Folia Linguistica48(1). 277–311. 10.1515/flin.2014.009
     https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2014.009 [Google Scholar]
  54. Vasileanu, Monica
    2016 Speakers’ attitude vs. official attitude: The case of Romanian Anglicisms. Presented atINPRA 2016 – The 7th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication. University of Split. Split, Croatia, June 10–12, 2016.
     [Google Scholar]
  55. Veisbergs, Andrejs
    2006 Systemic and structural changes in Latvian as a result of recent English influence. Journal of Baltic Studies37(4). 467–481. 10.1080/01629770608629624
     https://doi.org/10.1080/01629770608629624 [Google Scholar]
  56. Walker, James
    2015 False Anglicisms in French: A measure of their acceptability for English speakers. In Christiano Furiassi & Henrik Gottlieb (eds.), Pseudo-English: Studies on false Anglicisms in Europe, 159–174. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
     [Google Scholar]
  57. Zenner, Eline , Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts
    2013 Cognitive Sociolinguistics meets loanword research: Measuring variation in the success of anglicisms in Dutch. In Laura A. Janda (ed.), Cognitive linguistics: The quantitative turn. The essential reader, 251–294. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9783110335255.251
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110335255.251 [Google Scholar]
  58. D. Calc.
    D. Calc. = Ban, Marcel-Teodor , Manuel Miclea , Alin-Tavi Mireştean & Cristian Miclea 1994 Dicţionar explicativ de calculatoare englez-român şi român-englez [Romanian – English, English – Romanian explanatory dictionary for computing]. Bucharest: Editura Tehnică.
     [Google Scholar]
  59. D. Ec. Piață
    D. Ec. Piață = Bușe, Georgeta , Spiridonia Crăiete & Silvia Bârsan 1994 Dicţionarul complet al economiei de piaţă [The complete dictionary of market economy]. Bucharest: Informaţia Business Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  60. DEX-S
    DEX-S = Coteanu, Ion , Ion Dănăilă & Nicoleta Tiugan (eds.) 1988 Supliment la Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române [Supplement to the explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language]. The “Iorgu Iordan” Institute of Linguistics, Romanian Academy. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România.
     [Google Scholar]
  61. DEX 2009/2016
    DEX 2009/2016 = Coteanu, Ion (ed.) 2009/2016 Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române [The explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language]. 2nd rev. edn.The “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics, Romanian Academy. Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic Gold.
     [Google Scholar]
  62. DEXI
    DEXI = Dima, Eugenia (ed.) 2007 Dicţionar explicativ ilustrat al limbii române [The illustrated dictionary of Romanian]. Chişinău: Arc & Gunivas.
     [Google Scholar]
  63. D. Market
    D. Market. = Frone, Florin D. 1999 Dicţionar de marketing [Marketing dictionary]. Bucharest: Editura Oscar Print.
     [Google Scholar]
  64. NDU
    NDU = Oprea, Ioan , Carmen-Gabriela Pamfil , Rodica Radu & Victoria Zăstroiu 2006 Noul dicţionar universal al limbii române [The new universal dictionary of Romanian]. Bucureşti/Chişinău: Litera Internaţional.
     [Google Scholar]
  65. D.Ec.
    D.Ec. = Streinu, Anca 2000 Dicționar de economie [Dictionary of economics]. Bucharest: Editura Niculescu.
     [Google Scholar]
  66. DOOM-2005
    DOOM-2005 = Vintilă-Rădulescu, Ioana (ed.) 2005 Dicţionarul ortografic, ortoepic şi morfologic al limbii române [The orthographic, orthoepic and morphological dictionary of Romanian], 2nd rev. edn.Bucharest: [Editura] Univers Enciclopedic.
     [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
Loading
Acceptability and diffusion of luxury Anglicisms in present-day Romanian
Pragmatics & Cognition 25, 86 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
/content/journals/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
/content/journals/10.1075/pc.18007.nic
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): acceptability; diffusion; linguistic purism; luxury lexical Anglicisms; present-day Romanian; psycholinguistic experiment

Most Cited

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error