Les procédés de création lexicale régis par l’emprunt en espagnol péninsulaire contemporain

The observations and analyses given in this paper are the result of a previous study based on a broad corpus of about 1,000 neological loan words. The objective is to determine the functioning of a particular process of lexical creation : the importation of loan words. Even if this process seems quite easy to understand, it is interesting to look into the different properties it can include. By comparing the original lexical item with the neologism obtained, some changes become apparent. Three main types of loan words are identified according to the speaker’s involvement in the creation and therefore its integration into the target language : direct loans, modified loans and adapted loans (these last two types include subgroups depending on the modifications or adaptations they generate : phonological, morphological, graphical, syntactic, semantic changes, or loan translations).
The author’s analyses are consistently guided by a “processual focus” (point of view based on the operations rather than on the results – the neologisms – so that the mechanism used by the creator can be revealed) allowing a schematization of the mechanisms of loan translation that clearly accounts for the mental process put in place by the creator. It appears, finally, that the process of borrowing is a complex mechanism that not only calls on the internal linguistic systems in the borrowing language, but also on some knowledge of the source language.