engleski

Coining a Morphologically Equivalent Neologism as a Solution to the Problem of Crosslinguistic Terminological Ambiguity: The Case of 'Polity' and its Croatian and Italian Renderings

Assuming that the primary purpose of a loanword is to fill the lexical gap in the recipient language, which entails that the nature of warranted lexical borrowing is invariably functional, the author takes the English term 'polity' as an example of morphologically unadapted loanword both in Croatian and in Italian and focuses on its original meaning (including its etymology) in the donor language in order to assess the adequacy of the proposed equivalents by both English-Croatian and English-Italian bilingual dictionaries. The author deduces that considerable diversification of Croatian and Italian lexicographic renderings of the English term in question gives rise to the excessive use of the morphologically unadapted English form in political theory texts written in both recipient languages. Furthermore, the author confronts this phenomenon with the rendering of the etymologically cognate terms 'politics' and 'policy' which have a unique homonymous outcome in either recipient language, namely 'politika' in Croatian and 'politica' in Italian. Unlike the underlying concepts of 'politics' and 'policy', the concept underlying 'polity' cannot be lexicalised uniformly in all contexts in Croatian and in Italian. Therefore, it can be presumed that Croatian and Italian speakers’ conceptualisation of the meaning conveyed by this term is greatly hindered. With a view to obtaining a full compatibility between the semantic and phonetic poles in the two recipient languages which is supposed to be analogous to the one in the donor language, the author states the case that the solution to the problem of cross- and within- language ambiguity can be achieved through the method of coining morphologically cognate neologisms both in Croatian and in Italian. The coining process proposed by the author consists in employing the equivalents of the English suffix '- ity': '-(it)et' and +-(it)à+, which are highly productive in Croatian and Italian respectively, and attaching them to the etymon of this pseudo- Greek, yet essentially English, lexeme as its stem, i.e., 'poli(t)- < polis'. Due to the fact that all elements in newly formed words are already existent in Croatian and Italian, the novel word-formations are likely to reach a high level of integration in the vocabularies of the recipient languages.

ambiguity ; loanword ; neologism ; polity ; suffixation

nije evidentirano