Calquing as a Productive Means of Medical Terms Creation

Abstract

Languages have always come into contact and influenced one on another. The result of such a contact are borrowings and calques. Borrowings are common in languages for special purposes where the foreign words are borrowed to fill lexical gaps. On the other hand, calques appear because of puristic attempts to limit the invasion of foreign words into the target language. The aim of this paper is to investigate calques, their typology in the Croatian medical language and to confirm calquing as a precious means of medical terms creation. This is a corpus-based study which included Croatian medical publications. The analysis distinguished three main types of calques: lexical, syntactic and semantic. In the group of lexical calques, we recorded literal calques, semi-calques and loan creations. Syntactic calques refer mostly to juxtaposition which is commonly found in medical terminology under the English influence. Semantic calques include metaphor and analogy. The research stresses the importance of calques and their potential to enrich Croatian medical terminology.