A CLASSIFICATION OF BORROWINGS: OBSERVATIONS FROM ROMANIAN/ENGLISH CONTACT

Abstract

The classification of language contact phenomena has always been an important concern among researchers in the field. In particular, the term borrowing has received different definitions from different writers, covering a wide spectrum of words, from pure loanwords to hybrid loans and semantic extensions. This paper presents one of the most influential taxonomies of borrowings in the literature, and analyzes the way in which the various categories proposed in this taxonomy apply to the Romanian/English contact situation. English borrowings selected from a corpus of journalistic prose and from the specialized literature are used to illustrate the theoretical discussion.

Keywords

• Borrowing
• loanword
• loanblend
• loanshift