BORCILĂ

Abstract

his text summarizes the scientific work of the Romanian linguist and poetician Mircea Borcilă within two main fields of research: – in the domain of “integral” (Coserian) linguistics, Borcilă focuses on the philosophical and epistemological problems related to the principles of linguistics as a cultural science: language as logos semantikos, the basic characteristics (“universals”) of language (mainly creativity, semanticity and otherness) and Coseriuʼs decidedly anti-positivistic stance in the theory of language; – in the domain of poetics (more precisely, theory of metaphors), Borcilă creates his own synthesis, starting from three main conceptual sources: 1. the cognitivist approach in the anthropological poetics of Lakoff, Johnson, Turner and the like; 2. Eugenio Coseriuʼs text linguistics and his treatment of the metaphorical creation in language(s); 3. Lucian Blagaʼs definition of two essentially different types of metaphors, that is a) linguistic/ “plasticizing” vs. b) poetic/“revelatory”.

Keywords

• linguistic schools
• theory of language
• philosophy of language
• general linguistics
• anthropological poetics
• theory of metaphor(s)
• plasticizing metaphor