Baza de date „Diacronia” (BDD)
Titlu:

Recent English Borrowings in Romanian - a Quantitative Perspective

Autor:
Publicația: Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Philologica, 11 (2), p. 184-206
p-ISSN:1582-5523
Editura:Universitatea „1 Decembrie 1918”
Locul:Alba Iulia
Anul:
Rezumat:This article studies the phenomenon of English borrowing in Romanian in several of its aspects. Thus, the main purpose of the article is to analyze the distribution of borrowed elements across the various word classes of Romanian, and to give a general descriptive overview of each of these classes. As such, the study will be corpus-based and the analysis conducted will be mainly a quantitative one. Starting from the statistics resulting from this analysis, we put forth a hierarchy of borrowing for English/ Romanian contact, and compare it with a similar hierarchy abstracted from Romanian native material.
The theoretical perspective adopted for the definition of borrowing is a synchronic one. Thus, in this study we consider the formal criterion to be of paramount importance in separating borrowed from native material, a borrowing being taken to refer to any English lexical element in the corpus of Capital 2005 that is formally related to English. This acceptation of the term conforms to its definition in several influential works on the topic: linguistic borrowing is the deliberate reproduction or incorporation of elements found in one language in another one, as the result of specific socio-economic conditions surrounding the contact situation (Haugen 1950, Poplack 1988, Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Myers-Scotton 1992, 1993 among others). This view is also in line with those theories stating that, despite the earlier history of a word, only the last stage of the borrowing process is decisive in determining the donor language (Hristea 1984, Campbell 1998). The employment of the formal criterion in the definition of borrowing restricts the term to linguistically unadapted English-origin words, and excludes other language contact categories, most notably loanshifts or semantic loans, from the scope of the study. Furthermore, the distinction between cultural borrowings or necessary loans and core or intimate borrowings, also known as unnecessary or luxury loans will not be observed in this paper.
The analysis of the distribution of borrowed words across different grammar classes in the studied corpus of Capital 2005 reveals a striking preference for nouns, followed by adjectives and a very low number of verbs. On the other hand, other parts of speech are only peripherally represented in the studied corpus, English function words (determiners, pronouns, prepositions, numerals and conjunctions) being particularly tied to inter- and intra-sentential code-switching. This situation offers support to some hierarchies of borrowing put forth in the literature (Muysken 1981, Singh 1981, Ciobanu 2004), while partly contradicting others (Haugen 1950), but it once again confirms the almost universally accepted idea that nouns have the highest propensity to borrowing of all speech parts.
Cuvinte-cheie:borrowing constraint; borrowing hierarchy; word type; word token; word class
Limba: engleză
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