A typology of calques: the calquing mechanism in contemporary Basque

Abstract

The paper begins with a definition of calques that differentiates clearly between calque, loan and interference. Next calques are classified as semantic, lexical, lexical-phraseological, lexical-syntactic, phraseological, morphosyntactic and discourse calques. The literature on Basque contains frequent statements about the incorrectness or unacceptability of many calques attributed to Castilian or French interference. This paper, on the contrary, stresses the importance of calques and their potential for enriching the Basque language by facilitating the creation of new words in both general and specialized vocabularies. The paper emphazes the utility of well-constructed lexical calques in Basque, and criteria are set forth for evaluating the acceptability of a given calque, viewing calques as both a means and a mechanism of new word creation.