ENGLISH INFLUENCES IN ROMANIAN BUSINESS VOCABULARY

Our language reflects directly and ceaseless all changes that take place in a community, at the economical level, political, administrative, technical or informational. For this reason, our language creates new words with its own resources: derivation, composition, lexical family and borrowing. Usually, a language borrows from that foreign language that produces the innovation in a specific domain. If in the 19th century, the source of Romanian borrowings was literary Latin and neo-Romanics languages, especially French and Italian, and in some domains of techniques Romanian borrowed more from German, nowadays, the principal origin of borrowings is English. As we can easy check up Romanian borrows more words from English especially in domains like informatics, business, management, marketing, but also in fashion, music, showbiz and even in Romanian argotic language. From this point of view, barrowings (or loanwords) are a necessity of a language to cover a notion or concept that didn�t exist before and the Romanian language cannot create a correspondent to cover that meaning. Business language became daily language based on situations which arise daily in ordinary businesses from Monday to Friday. Words like manager, staff, credit card, design, advertising, agreement, show-room had entered in our usual vocabulary. We will analyze the importance of loanwords, their classifications and their correct use in Romanian language.loanwords, Business English, Romanian language, Anglicisation, linguistic globalisation.

The perception of English-accented polish – a pilot study

•Does familiarity with a specific foreign language facilitate the recognition and identification of that accent in foreign-accented Polish

“Drugs, traffic, and many other dirty interests”: metaphor and the language learner

Research into metaphor in foreign language teaching has primarily focused on the comprehension process, with little if any attention being paid to its effect on students' spoken and written production. While the learning and storing of vocabulary has been shown to be made more effective when extended meanings are signalled by the teacher (Boers 2000; Charteris-Black 2002; Deignan et al. 1997; Holme 2004), much less can as yet be said about the ways in which language learners incorporate figurative language into their normal productive repertoire. Danesi (1994) argues that "conceptual fluency" is fundamental if students are to achieve naturalness in their language production. But linguistic fluency is not created from concepts alone: there is no guarantee that knowledge of the underlying idea will result in the reproduction of lexicogrammatical patternings that are both meaningful and acceptable to a target language audience. When learners produce metaphorical language, they overwhelmingly adhere to concepts that they find familiar. The stock phrases and dead metaphors that advanced students use when writing discursive and argumentative texts are heavily influenced by the conventional conceptualisations shared by their L1, with expressions drawing on L2-specific concepts rarely appearing. When these concepts do appear, they are often presented in ways which are unfamiliar and strange to the native ear, as in this exploitation of the idiomatic expression "to fly the nest": "In the very near future male migrant birds start looking for their new nests for leaving from their parents". Language users - both natives and learners - are often unaware of the dead metaphors contained in conventional figurative expressions. Although it is often possible to identify the metaphorical motivation of such expressions when they are observed in isolation, corpus-based analysis of their use in context suggests that the figurative meaning tends to remain inactive in everyday language use (Philip 2004). It is perhaps because of this relative unawareness of metaphor that students produce such characteristic phraseological oddities as the one contained in the title to this paper. If conceptual mapping from L1 to L2 is incomplete, or the L2 concept unfamiliar, the fluency of production will inevitably be disrupted. But the data analysed so far in this study suggests that concepts can be perfectly in place, but not expressed effectively for purely phraseological reasons, which raises the question of how concept and phraseology interact to create meanings which natives find acceptable. Which exerts the stronger force: collocation or conceptualisation? This paper will discuss the figurative language produced by a group of advanced learners of English in Italy, comparing their conceptual and phraseological fluency with general reference corpora in both Italian and English (CORIS - Corpus di Italian Scritto, University of Bologna, and the Bank of English Online - HarperCollins publishers), with a view to addressing the relationship between concept and wording

Emovo Corpus: an Italian Emotional Speech Database

This article describes the first emotional corpus, named EMOVO, applicable to Italian language,. It is a database built from the voices of up to 6 actors who played 14 sentences simulating 6 emotional states (disgust, fear, anger, joy, surprise, sadness) plus the neutral state. These emotions are the well-known Big Six found in most of the literature related to emotional speech. The recordings were made with professional equipment in the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni laboratories. The paper also describes a subjective validation test of the corpus, based on emotion-discrimination of two sentences carried out by two different groups of 24 listeners. The test was successful because it yielded an overall recognition accuracy of 80%. It is observed that emotions less easy to recognize are joy and disgust, whereas the most easy to detect are anger, sadness and the neutral state

My English poetry

Some of Professor Joseph Aquilina's poems in English have been published sporadically in various numbers ofThe Journal of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta and in the press, both during his lifetime and after. The present paper includes the text ofan unpublished lecture the author gave in the 1970s in which he spoke about his poetic works in English, how they were conceived, and about their place in Maltese literature and Commonwealth literature. Some of these poems are being reproducedfor the first time.peer-reviewe

A reconstruction of the multipreference closure

The paper describes a preferential approach for dealing with exceptions in KLM preferential logics, based on the rational closure. It is well known that the rational closure does not allow an independent handling of the inheritance of different defeasible properties of concepts. Several solutions have been proposed to face this problem and the lexicographic closure is the most notable one. In this work, we consider an alternative closure construction, called the Multi Preference closure (MP-closure), that has been first considered for reasoning with exceptions in DLs. Here, we reconstruct the notion of MP-closure in the propositional case and we show that it is a natural variant of Lehmann's lexicographic closure. Abandoning Maximal Entropy (an alternative route already considered but not explored by Lehmann) leads to a construction which exploits a different lexicographic ordering w.r.t. the lexicographic closure, and determines a preferential consequence relation rather than a rational consequence relation. We show that, building on the MP-closure semantics, rationality can be recovered, at least from the semantic point of view, resulting in a rational consequence relation which is stronger than the rational closure, but incomparable with the lexicographic closure. We also show that the MP-closure is stronger than the Relevant Closure.Comment: 57 page