The Dangers of Borrowing More than Individual English Words: the Mutations Inside Idioms and Collocations

Abstract

There are numerous papers and studies devoted to Romanian loanwords which were adopted by Romanian speakers from English. Some of these words are useful and denominate realities for which the Romanian language does not have a formal and semantic equivalent, while others have a perfectly functional equivalent in Romanian, being thus unnecessary borrowings used especially out of snobbism. The present paper aims at going beyond individual words by exploring more complex lexical structures such as collocations and idioms. Borrowing such complex lexical structures, the so called ‘chunks of language’ or ’prefabricated structures’, from English is a relatively new phenomenon in Romanian. There are not too many such structures, but the Romanian speakers who tend to integrate them in their speech have two easily noticeable problems, i.e. they either use them in the wrong context or try to adapt them to collocations already existing in Romanian, thus making them sound strange, to say the least. The examples analysed in this paper are meant to illustrate how the phenomenon/phenomena of ”lexical mutation” and/or ”structural mutation” make the collocations and idioms borrowed from English sound awkward and inappropriate in Romanian.