In an elicitation experiment, 109 Romanian native subjects were presented with 50 pictures of hybrid objects, e.g. a half-orange, half-pear fruit, and were asked to name each object using a single word either in Romanian or in English. 64.66% of the elicited English words were blends, thus confirming the expected tendency towards using blends in English; unexpectedly, the same tendency was observed for Romanian with 68.50% blends. In Romanian linguistics, lexical blending has been seldom mentioned, interest resting only in speech errors, and not in the deliberate phenomenon as a fullyfledged word formation process of Romanian morphology. We believe that our data analysis suggests a shift in Romanian word formation tendencies, possibly under the pervasive influence of English.
In this paper we focus on some of the most important features of idioms, motivation and compositionality, in particular. The introductory part deals with theoretical aspects of the new linguistic discipline known as cognitive studies. From a cognitive point of view, idioms are figurative linguistic units which exist at the intersection point of language, cognition and culture. The main idea, which we support, is that of Dobrovol'skij, one of the first linguists to apply the theory of conceptual metaphors in idiom analysis. In the second part of the paper we continue -as stated in the introduction -with an analysis of some Bulgarian and Romanian idioms that express the concept of intelligence or stupidity.
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