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THE DENOMINATIONS OF A PERSON ACCORDING TO ONE’S AGE AND KINSHIP. IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS DURING THE CURRENT SOCIOLINGUISTIC CIRCUMSTANCES
Authors: Raluca Miruna SOISUN
Number of views: 307
Current research examines the person’s identity “individual of the human species, considered human in the entirety of one’s physical and psychological characteristics, human being, man”, in regards to alterity. The word “person” is a gender neutralizer, due to the fact that the person is a woman “feminine gender mature person” or man “masculine gender mature person”. In real life, an individual possesses certain traits that, at certain time, serve as proof for one’s identity. During their existence, some data remain persistent, and others fluctuate or might change course. Extralinguistic reality has a certain organization, which, at the level of language, corresponds to a macrostructural organization (groups of concepts) and to a microstructural organization (semantic groups of words), that can be clarified through the means of lexicographic analysis, semic analysis and contextual analysis. A presentation of the terms that are used to define the person takes the following factors into consideration: age, kinship (family), sexual orientation, community rapport (ethnical, linguistic, denominational, local, zodiacal affiliation), occupation (profession) and civic implication.
We analyse the denominative structure according to the first two factors. We shine a light on the denominations of a person according to their age and gender, following their childhood, teenagerhood, maturity, old age (lexical fields, de-no¬tative and connotative meanings), based on the research of colloquial speech and current media discourse.
We reexamine the terminology of the direct and collateral natural (blood) kinship, as well as the one of social kinship. The terminology used for the members of the close family is almost in entirety inherited from Latin, suffers no changes of meaning and is constituted in binary gender pairs. For each concept, there is a prototypical lexeme and others that cir¬culate regionally, are archaic, or rare.
We highlight the process of metaphorizing the terms, which led to their figurative meaning. We show, through examples in contexts, that this process is an ongoing one, proving the expresiveness resources of the Romanian language and the inventiveness of its speakers.