Communicative patterns in Romanian workplace written texts (original) (raw)
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Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
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Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (II
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THE HISTORICAL VARIATION OF THE PRAGMEME 'GREETING' IN ROMANIAN
The article focuses on greetings and phenomena related to greetings from the perspective of pragmatic act and speech act theories. Greetings reflect a communicative behaviour with ritual roots. The analysis is based mainly on a corpus of written texts from the 17 th – 19 th centuries and on several corpora of present-day spoken Romanian. Greetings are utterances whose goal varies across time: in the premodern and at the beginning of the modern Romanian society the goal of a greeting is both to produce gratification and to highlight the obligations of social inferiors towards their superiors, in a rigid hierarchy (the preferred allopracts being mainly nonverbal). When the social hierarchy gradually begins to lose its rigidity, greetings are used to produce gratification and social bonds or even to promote a type of self-image. In the transition from marking social obligations to marking social bonds, some ritual forms have become conventionalized, obscuring for their users their original meaning.
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Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (I)
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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 19 th 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, showroom had entered in our usual vocabulary. We will analyze the importance of loanwords, their classifications and their correct use in Romanian language.
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