LEXICAL LOAN, CULTURAL OVERTONE

Abstract

In cultural terms, the influence of Anglo-American life is obvious in the number of lexical loans accompanying the development of speculative thought and scientific ideas in today’s Romanian environment. We shall proceed to analyze loans in relation to transmorphemization, which points to degrees of morphological substitution of (in our case, English) loan words when brought into Romanian. In primary adaptation, the vast majority of such words remain at the stage of zero substitution; fewer cases than those cover the loan words undergoing complete transmorphemization. The innovative potential of the recipient language is shown in the stage of secondary adaptation in which the process of word formation is very much alive: learned words of Greek and Latin origin are replaced by the corresponding Romanian lexical elements. Between these extremes – zero and complete processes – exists what has been dubbed compromise substitution or compromise transmorphemization.