BETWEEN FORMAL VARIATION AND NORMATIVITY: GALLICISMS IN ROMANIAN AND SPANISH

Abstract

Gallicisms are both specific features of French and borrowings from French by other languages (neologisms). Our collective project focuses on Gallicisms in several Romance languages. These borrowings follow paths and motivations and employ processes that partially resemble those of slang and specialized languages, as slang is described by French linguists: word replacement and substitution, lexical neologism through the creation of new words or the distortion of existing ones, lists of synonyms that duplicate existing lexical units, errors such as metathesis, and semantic and stylistic developments such as metonymy and polysemy. It remains to examine the relationship between these borrowings and formal variation in the Romanian lexicon, as well as their relation to the prescriptive norm in Spanish.