Lexical Borrowing, Categorization, and Mental Representation

The article argues that lexical borrowing is not only motivated by cultural factors linked to prestige or economical aspects but also by the speakers’ need for new lexical-semantic categories and for highly expressive metaphorical terms to operate with, which makes them borrow words. The semantic changes of the lexical borrowings point to the creation of new items in the semantic fields of the receiving language. The integration of borrowings into Hungarian and Romanian exemplifies these processes.