Search

This paper reopens the discussion concerning the meaning of linguistic imaginary, a fairly new concept in Romanian scholarship that has been interpreted in three ways. Most Romanian researchers have been focused on this term from a metalinguistic perspective, according to which linguistic imaginary matches the speaking subject's representations on the language. In addition to this quite well-known approach, Elena Platon acknowledges another one, suggested by ethnolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. To be more precise, the aim of our study is to reveal the course imaginary from an ethnolinguistic point of view, provided by an author from Poland, Johanna Ewa Cholewa. According to her theory, each word has both cultural and linguistic images. From such a perspective, we will try to reconstruct the linguistic image of the concept „course”. In order to identify and interpret the linguistic representations of the course, our present paper aims to analyse the following elements: etymology, semantic problems, synonyms, derivatives, phonetics, proverbs, and expressions containing the word „course” and its derivatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]