- Conference Article
- 10.55383/iadc2025.70
Compound words and figurative expressions with musical terminology from modern italian language
- Sep 01, 2025
- Lidia Cazacu
It is known that the enrichment of the vocabulary of a language occurs in various ways. The procedure established by us in this presentation is based on the use of words from within the personal lexical repertoire. Thus, a term already existing in any specialized language can be "borrowed" to be used to name another concept or phenomenon from another domain of human activity, thus amplifying its significant range. The phenomenon in question is widely used especially in the composition of words, as well as in their reuse in creating various expressions with figurative meaning. In the present article, we have limited ourselves specifically to the examination of such complex structures in the composition of which we identify a term from the musical language. To this end, we have also compared their frequency in Italian and Romanian. Broadly speaking, we observe that in the process of lexical-semantic transformations, two different glottis phenomena intersect, namely, word composition and metaphor. However, despite the fact that they are part of different linguistic compartments (lexicology and stylistics), we will note their productive interaction, treating them from the perspective of the onomasiological function of the language. For example, the word music, in addition to its basic meaning, known in musical terminology, extends into a wide range of meanings in different expressions and contexts with reference to states, situations, facts that are prolonged longer than required, creating boredom and monotony. La solita/la stessa musica! - a very frequently encountered expression, especially with reference to political characters and situations. "The players change but the music is always the same." The generic term "note", as a component element in a combination of words of the type "nota stonata" (a note out of tune, wrong in the context of common language), leads to the transformation and amplification of the nominative value of the word itself, generating a more complete meaning, with the meaning of "behavior, gesture or inopportune speech". Thus, the denotation of the word exceeds the denominative limit, conferring the given situation a metaphorical, connotative valence. The lexicon examined in this article focuses on the most frequent lexical units, words and expressions with musical terminology, encountered especially in everyday speech, which can generate both different meanings and a more "colorful" and succinct expression in everyday communication. The results of the research could be applied both from a lexicological and didactic perspective. Finally, we intend to create a small vocabulary of the accumulated terms that could be of interest both theoretically and pragmatically.
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