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Swearing is a special kind of expressive speech act, whose use is restricted by certain pragmatic parameters that are determined by a given situation of communication (the interlocutors' social role status and their relationship - deference/ intimacy - among others). Structurally, expletives are small-sized verbal sequences. They usually display a standard pattern of construction: - a verb, in the subjunctive or conditional mood with an imperative value (1st, 2nd or 3rd person sg./ pl.) or in the imperative mood (2nd person sg./ pl.), occupies the first position in the utterance. It is most often chosen from the sexually connoted and diaphasically marked register of language: see, for instance, the counterpart of the standard language verb phrases a avea contact sexual 'to have sexual intercourse' and a întreține contact sexual 'to engage in sexual intercourse' or of the verbs a se împerechea 'to mate' and a se acupla 'to copulate' in the slang language of expletives (a (se) fute 'to fuck'). The swear verb is followed by - a clitic (an unstressed pronoun), -te (2nd person sg.)/ -vă (2nd person pl.), syntactically functioning as a direct object and identifying the patient of the expletive expressive speech act, and by - an anthroponym designating the referent, a real individual (Ceaușescu) or fictional figure (Aladin), who is "invited" in absentia (by means of evocation) to (fancifully) act out/ to perform the action expressed by the verb. The present paper proposes a classification and analysis of Romanian expletives that contain anthroponyms on three levels: grammatical, semantic-stylistic and suprasentential (textual-discursive). To support our subsequent arguments, we make use of precepts specific to the following linguistic subjects: functional grammar, pragmastylistics, speech act theory and sociolinguistics. The corpus explored was compiled by the authors and includes genuine expressive speech acts (i. e. expletives), taken from spoken or written (Internet) spontaneous interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image did not always have a privileged status, and imagination did not benefit of an increased attention till the invention of television. The faculty of imagination occupied a secondary role in man's life, most of the times being identified as a source of fraud or of the hidden truth. Nevertheless, imagination is a human ability which, consciously or not, has manifested its presence in man's existence and behavior. Together with the development of new informational technologies, that amplify the role of image, the imagination understood as creative force is reinstated and its value is acknowledged. In this context, the myth, seen once as imaginary story, appears as a form of thinking that oversees the connection between imagination and reality. Thus, in the present paper, I suggest an analysis of the relation between imagination and reality by means of the notion of myth, as constitutive element of human thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]