Mostly Medieval: In Memory of Jacek Fisiak

490 Mostly Medieval phase. Rarely addressed in studies on loan translations are semantic processes such as semantic and collocational changes in the lexical components of a loan translation, its semantic lexicalization and degrees of non-compositionality, as well as contact-induced and independent semantic development in the recipient language. There is a need of in-depth cross-linguistic studies on English-sourced loan translations, based on a sizeable body of language data from various European and non-European languages to see how factors such as genetic (un)relatedness between the languages in contact or lack of immediate physical contact between the two speech communities (weak contact setting) influence the formation of loan translations. It would also be interesting to see whether speakers of other languages use the same borrowing strategies in rendering foreign concepts. Polish speakers loan translated Eng. skyscraper to name ‘a high-rise building’ and imported Eng. skyscraper ad in the form of a reduced loanword (Pol. skyscraper) to designate ‘a tall and thin banner advertisement placed on the right side of other Web page elements.’ A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted comparative study would let us look for potentially universal mechanisms in foreign concepts naming strategies. A study of loan translations also calls for a sociolinguistic perspective. The perception of loan translations by the recipient language speakers and the institutionalization process need to be discussed against factors that facilitate or inhibit the integration of calqued expressions in the speech of the recipient language users. In European lexicography there is a need for a cross-linguistic analyzing of set expressions loan translated from English and for the corpus-based defining and recording of their idiomatic senses. A provisional study of scarce language data taken from European publications on loans suggests that English has become the new source of pan-European culture-specific multi-word internationalisms. This claim, however, calls for more extensive multi-lingual research. The sources of material excerption should include, among others, professional jargons, which abound in English-sourced loans of various types. References Andersen, Gisle (2012) “Semi-automatic Approaches to AnglicismDetection inNorwegian Corpus Data.” [In:] Cristiano Furiassi, Virginia Pulcini, Félix Rodríguez González (eds.) The Anglicization of European Lexis. Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins; 111–130. DOI: 10.1075/z.174.09and

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