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The Language of Stock Exchange Transactions. Trends in English and Romanian Trends (in English and Romanian) – Impossible Synonimy Asist. univ. drd. Teodora GHIVIRIGĂ Universitatea „Al. I . Cuza” din Iaşi The economic and political changes following 1989 involved the effort of tuning in to world and European institutions and practices; this required a considerable linguistic effort to (re)create terminologies in fields where the communist regime had prevented or discouraged any development – such as Psychology or Economics. The terminology of the various branches of the economic scineces have had uneven developments: while some – such as Economics continued to expand previous sets of terms, others had to radically restructure their terminology due to mutations in the field / practice. At the crossroads between scientific and technical terminology, the language of the stock-exchange is peculiar in English in that it displays a feature that is considered uncharacteristic of terminologies: synonymy. While the premise of any terminology is, in Wüster’s words, the univocal relation between the concept and the term, synonymy may accidentally occur (synonymic pairs, quasi-synonyms). In the language of the stock-exchange transactions, however, large synonymic series appear, consisting of motion verbs describing trends (according to one study, more than 60 denoting an ascending movement and more than 40 denoting a descending movement of prices) in texts describing the evolution of prices or in stock-exchange reports. The present paper is an attempt to analyse quantitatively and semantically whether the range of such verbs (motion verbs mainly) in English and Romanian texts is comparable, in an attempt to assess and account for possible discrepancies. Preliminaries The economic and political changes in Romania following 1989 involved the effort of tuning in to world and European institutions and practices; this required a considerable linguistic effort to (re)create terminologies in fields where the communist regime had prevented or discouraged any development – such as Psychology or Economics. The terminology of the various branches Economics have had uneven developments: while some – such as Political Economics continued to expand pre-1945 sets of terms, others had to radically restructure their terminology due to mutations in the field/practice – one such example is the language of stock-exchange transactions. The ideal of any terminology is the univocal relation between the concept and its designation, which ensures the accuracy and unambiguity that are necessary for the communication of ideas and/or for the achieving the practical ends to which ideas and theories are meant to be applied. Although personal / subjective attitudes & beliefs and a certain degree of expresiveness directed at persuasion may have their part in the discourse of science (as discussed with respect to Economics, for instance, by McCloskey, 1986, 1993 or Henderson and Dudley-Evans, 1993), it is generally agreed that, in order to be functional, the terminology in the scientific text has to be accepted by the actors of the academic community and / or by the practitioners in the domain. 311 Therefore, the presence of synonymy1 in terminology has been overlooked, regarded as merely accidental, a flaw to be considered and, if possible, corrected, since their existence is contrary to the quality of precision and economy characteristic to specialised languages. However, the phenomenon has to be acknowledged and discussed, since sets of synonyms have been identified in various sublanguages. The existence of synonymous terms can be put down to several factors: the various channels and periods at which a term enters a language (the coexistence in Romanian medical terminology, for instance of synonymical sets of both Anglo-saxon and French origin: AIDS and SIDA, to quote only one example); the stylistical orientation of the text (Igl, 1989: 276) – whether the text is aimed at the community of specialists, therefore it will be highly specialised, or at the general public, a case in which, for the purpose of increased accessibility and intelligibility that are mandatory in the process of popularization, lexical units that approximate the meaning of the term may be used; the subjective factor of an individual’s proficiency in languages and their intimacy with the domain and its terminology – for instance, a lack of knowledge of the mother tongue of translators advertising products for infant care (Manea & Manea, 2006) led to pairs such as bebeluş replacing the older sugar, raşul de scutece (< rash) replacing older terms such as erupţie sau eritem etc. Synonymous sets (also known as pairs – dublete terminologice, Nistor, 2002:121) can be put down to geographical varieties or different systems, such as British share-holder and American stock-holder or to the more recent phenomenon of corporate culture, the process of differentiation – linguistic, among other things – of similar products and services offered by companies that strive to individualize their brand on the market. Although such factors discard the hypothesis of perfect equivalence, perfect synonyms – though in restricted numbers – can still be found in various sublanguages: that of Economics (and its related sciences) among others: statement-of-account ~ extract of account, buy ~ purchase, nominal value ~ face value etc. Synonymy has been discussed in relation with various sciences / domains, as shown in the previous section. The present paper is concerned with a restricted, clearly defined segment of a sublanguage at the crossroads between scientific and technical terminology - Stock exchange transactions related to the broader field of Economics – that of describing the behaviour of prices and stocks or of, as it sometimes is also presented, trends. A remark should be made on the fact that trends need not necessarily be restricted to the activitiy of the (financial) markets, it can be used to present the dynamics of other related economic activities: in relation with demography referring to the evolution of the work-force along a given period, in relation with production and productivity, sales, market-shares etc. However, as shown by the amount of examples (especially in English), the bulk is extracted from stock-market reports, commentaries and forecasts. The parallel examples contains texts extracted from both virtual and hard sources. In Romanian, the selection ranges from samples of statistics, reports and summaries of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, which are highly repetitive and limited in lexical choice and variation, to articles from specialised e-journals or sites (such as The Money Channel, Business Standard or bloombiz), which – due to the nature of their message and target audience, deploy a larger number of linguistic options and greater freedom in textual structure. Sources whose main purpose is not to transmit accurate information or specialised commentaries – such as blogs and texts pertaining to a different register, that of advertising have, however, been altogether eliminated. In English, where the phenomenon was first identified and studied, the sources were richer and more various, including selections from the site of NYSE, from the specialised British journal Financial Times (both hard and electronic versions), other specialised sites, as well as ESP text books, both English and Romanian, where the topic is taught to a variable extent, or at least mentioned, considering the importance attributed to the student’s ability to describe the evolution – or trend – in various activities and to transfer / translate iconic elements (in)to language. It should be mentioned, however, as a general and predictable feature, that in both 1 For the purpose for of this paper, that which does not intend to define or discuss the concept as such, synonymy is used in its broader sense, of partial synonymy or “semantic similarity” and it includes periphrases. 312 languages the tendency is that the more official the source of the text, the more formal the language and the more reduced the number of synonyms. The premise of the discussion is that the type of relation between these units is that of (partial) synonymy or „semantic similarity” and the analysis will identify elements of structural and semantic similarity as well differences: semantic classes (verbs of activity vs. state verbs ). Lexical synonymy of the type presented in the initial section of this paper is not, however, the only one possible. The economic discourse, as that of most exact sciences, displays synonymy at the level of the codes used: such mixed syntax is considered as one of the distinguishing features of scientific discourse. Symbols (mathematical), graphs, charts and other such iconic elements can be ”translated” using the linguistic code – or the codes of the natural languages: this suggests an equivalence encoded by the author that is decoded accordingly by the receiver of the message, provided the conventions are known / accepted by both. It should be said at this point that all units describing an upward trend / movement, and downward, respectively, are iconically represented by means of either a set of symbols ( arrows pointing upward and downward respectively), or by mathematical symbols (+ for an ascending trend and – for a descending trend respectively) or by means of a colour code (green standing for a positive evolution and red for a negative one)2. Therefore, they can be considered equivalents (synonymical) from a functional point of view. Discussion There are two points to make here, which will be discused in turn. One is that the linguistic units presented above belong to two different semantic classes: the largest group belongs to the class of motion verbs, a group whose syntactic behaviour can be predicted by its semantic configuration / meaning (Levin, 1993 English Verb Classes and Alternations). According to classifications, the event type that is expressed by the change of location / position can be described in terms of path, source and goal. Motion can be generally characterized as having a starting point and an ending point, an origin (source) and a destination (goal), and consequently presupposes an understanding of both time and space (Cehan, 2000:175). The semantic structure of the motion verb consists basically of two parts: one indicating movement in the most general sense – the prototype is GO; another subordinate one made up of certain components specifying the distinctive features of the movement. The subordinate element may be null in some cases (such as GO and COME), while in other cases it can combine one or several of the following elements: course (turn), speed (hurry), impetus (dash), distance (travel), manner (glide); some such elements have prepositional realization: direction (to), passage (cross), across), direction (to), means / propellent (ride, rocket), space (fly=> air); others duration, accompaniment, purpose, result. Most of the members of the group quoted (English) fall under one of these categories. According to Dixon (1991), they are primary A (motion or rest mainly) or B (relating mean, represent) and share as distinctive features the fact that many do not take an object (are intranzitive) and that, when used in a literal sense, take concrete nouns as heads of their subjects. When they do not, the use of the verb can be considered to be metaphorical or viewed as ”an idiosyncratic extension of meaning” (Dixon, 1991: 89). It is obvious from the examples provided that such verbs are used metaphorically: as mentioned previously, their arguments are, in most cases, inanimate abstract nouns: whether we consider such subjects as the price, the value, a certain currency such as the Euro, the sterling or the dollar, the BET-C index, the silver or gold (not the metal itself as concrete mass, but its economic value as commodity), or any other example from the corpus, the The same code is also present in such idiomatic phrases as “The Nasdaq Composite has fallen back into the red in conjunction with the tech sector” (http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/briefing/StockTicker.aspx) or „All of the major indices are now trading in the green.” (http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/briefing/StockTicker.aspx) 2 313 same holds true. A consequence of selecting abstract nouns as subjects is that the action (movement) cannot be considered to originate in the subject (which again may be said to affect the dynamic character); this also adds to the metaphorical interpretation, since abstract / inanimates are seen as capable of movement. The synonymical sets which are the material for this discussion consist of a number of lexical units and phraseological units that can be grouped basically into three semantically related subsets: units describing an ascending tendency, units describing a descending trend, and units that refer to stagnation / lack of change. The units can be classified as verbs / verb phrases and nouns / noun phrases. An extended study of this restricted domain in English has shown that there are more than 60 denoting an ascending movement and more than 40 denoting a descending movement of prices (Igl, 1989:278), a surprisingly large number – a total of over 100, if the units referring to stagnation are to be included – considering the limited nature of the domain. It includes verbs such as accelerate, bolster (up), bottom out, bounce (back), come down, climb, crash, decline, decrease, dip, drop, ease back, edge back, escalate, fall /fall off / fall to a low, flatten out, fluctuate, gain, gap, go down /up, grow, hold, steady, improve, inch (higher), increase, leap, levell off / out, jump, peak, pick up, plummet, plunge, push (back), rally, reach (a low, a high, a peak, a record), remain (constant), recover, retreat, rise, rocket, settle down, shrink, shoot up, slide, slip, slump, soar, stabilize, stair-step, stand, stay (at the same level, steady), stagnate, strengthen, surge, take off, top out, track, tumble, zigzag, etc. to which the following phrases are added: to hit (record) high, lead the way down, come to an abrupt halt, see little movement / strong growth, resist a decline, gain ground, to continue weakness, move into profit, make a good start, be up / down, to return to positive territory, to record / mean an increase / decrease, to be a drag etc. To these, few nouns / noun phrases can be added: growth (The largest price growth was seen in food oil), be in a downward slope (EDX London ... moved into profit for the year with strong growth in activity), make a very strong start (The London Stock Exchange made a very strong start to 2007), progress (This reflects good progress on a subsequent commitment) where, however, the idea of motion is still preserved and rendered semantically (downward, start, progress etc.). The fact that verbs or phrases expressing an upward trend significantly outnumber those referring to the downward trend could be accounted for by a phenomenon akin to taboo, linked to the presence of a ”sort of superstition” that their use might “bring a curse on future economic development” resulting in “a form of self-imposed censorship, a tacit agreement to ban those ‘dirty words’ from the language” (Resche, 2000:264). One of the very terms to which this form of taboo applies is the verb sell (also mentioned as the S- four-lletter word), which over a decade – from the ‘80 to the end of the ’90 moved from a ratio of one to one against buy to a surprising of 1 to 68 (according to a statistic in The Economist in 1999) in the recommendations (to buy or sell) made by specialists to investors in the specialised press, since “an official ‘sell’ recommendation” also risks triggering a wave of panic among shareholders rushing to follow the advice, thus causing prices to drop further (Resche, 2000:265). The Romanian verbs expressing movement (“verba movendi”) are a subclass of the main category of verbs expressing action. Except this subclass, most of the others consist of transitive verbs. The spatial dimensions have an important role: when describing certain processes or actions, people tend to relate them to the place of the subject, to the position of the object or to any other element involved in the development of the action expressed by the verb. This role is suggested by the large number of verbs used to express shifting / mutation of things in space (a merge, a urca, a zbura, a veni, a pleca, etc.), their position in relation to other objects (a se suprapune, a se înălţa, etc.) or by the variety of prefixes used with a local meaning (a alătura, a alipi, a desprinde, a suprapune, etc). (Evseev, 1974: 72 – 73). In the lexical system of a language, the spatial dimensions are to be found among the main coordinates which group the words in synonyms, antonyms and other semantic relations. e.g. synonyms: a se urca – a se căţăra – a se sui – a se cocoţa – a se ridica – a escalada – a se înălţa; antonyms: a ieşi – a intra; a decola – a ateriza; a pleca – a veni; a se 314 apropia – a se îndepărta. The exemples from the corpus belonging to this category are few: a urca (Cel mai mult au urcat titlurile SIF Muntenia; Preţurile la producători din zona euro au urcat în iunie până la un nivel record), a coborî (Toate cursurile valutare au reuşit să coboare sub nivelul de la deschidere; Titlurile au coborât pe final sub preţul de referinţă), two exemples of verbs expressing fluctuation – a oscila (Bursa a oscilat indecis3 în prima jumãtate de oră) şi a varia (Farmaceuticele variază de asemenea cu amplitudinea unui pas de cotare) and two exemples of verbs expressing stagnation: a stagna (Leul a stagnat în prima parte a zilei) şi a se menţine (Valoarea de tranzacţionare s-a menţinut în apropierea rulajelor din ultima perioadă), but in this last case the subject of the verb (valoarea) is clearly associated to the concept of value at least as strongly as to that of (absence of) motion resulting in change of position signalled by the complex preposition (în apropierea). To these, one more motion verb in Romania could be added, referring to a type of movement away from the subject a se îndepărta (Euro s-a apreciat ... şi s-a îndepărtat faţă de nivelul minim) There is another larger subset of (Romanian) verbs, however, that do not include any of the elements present in the classification above and we can, therefore, consider that they are not related semantically to this group: a creşte, a (se) aprecia / deprecia, a marca / a înregistra / a indica / a avea o apreciere / depreciere, a creşte / a scădea, a se constata o creştere / scădere, a deschide / a închide pe creştere / scăderem, a recupera o pierdere, a pierde, a deschide cu / a păstra / a avea un avans. We could associate this number of instances to the idea of value and / or quantity, the change referring not to (change of ) location / position (as with motion verbs), but rather to value and / or quantity. Romanian grammarians place them in a category different from that of action verbs, to which motion verbs belong; they are related to state verbs and verbs of becoming (Evseev, 1974:94) (Irimia, 1887:158). There are some other examples of verbs / verbal collocations referring to value / quantity are: a recupera (Indicele societăţilor de investiţii a recuperat mai bine de un procent), a-şi diminua câştigul (SIF Transilvania a fost singura societate de investiţii care şi-a diminuat câştigul luna trecută). I propose, therefore, that these verbs are not connected with the concept of activity / motion and their dynamic character indicating movement is absent. A remark could be made that in the case of the latter: with semantic mutations of the metaphorical / metonymic type, changes may occur especially at the level of voice, but also with the development of new syntactic relations, wiht respect to transitivity (Irimia, 1998:159). Instances when a motion verb is used transitively are most infrequent (the few existing ones may possibly reveal the influence of foreign models – English mainly): a sălta [cotaţia] (Rezultatele financiare anunţate de bancă au săltat cotaţia... cu peste 2%) sau a prăbuşi [acţiunile] (Rezultatele dezamăgitoare ...au prăbuşit acţiunile cu peste 9%). In contrast to English, in the Romanian texts there is also a marked preference for nominal forms (Infinitivul lung), while in the English the verb is the more frequent by far. Conclusion In analysing the two sets of examples (English and Romanian), several differences have been identified: the preference for intransitive motion verbs belonging to a large synonymic series favoured over any other type of verb, in cotrast with the Romanian preference for phrases containing the nominal form of the verb, with very few instances of motion verbs, while state and process verbs referring to value and quantity are more frequent. The obvious preference for motion verbs (used metaphorically) in the English texts – could be related to the way an abstract domain can be mapped through the use of metaphors. Following Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of Cognitive Semantics, several studies and articles (Boers & Demecheleer, 1997, Resche, 1999, Varó, 2000, Kermas, 2006, Iulia-Corina Dobrotă, 2006) have identified various metaphors at work in the language of business and economics. Boers & Demecheleer (1997, A Few Metaphorical Models in (Western) Economic Discourse), for instance, identify the following conceptual metaphors 3 ...and we could also ignore the pleonasm, considering that style is not the topic of this paper... 315 „economics is a tool, a path”, ”competition (in business) is a race” (British economy was lagging behind); ”competition is a fight / war” (the British car industry was not able to fight their Japanese competitors); Dobrotă (Probleme ale metaforei în discursul economic, 2006) also suggests the metaphor ”economy is a ship” etc. The various metaphors may not necessarily be related to universal human experiences. They may be culturally oriented, as different communities may express the same experience in different schemata. Relating this to the English and Romanian material presented so far, it appears that while the English conceptual metaphor „economy is a path” relies heavily on the up-down axis, with referrences mainly to the manner of movement semantically encoded in the verb, as obviated by a large set of synonymical motion verbs, economic activity being a continual change implying movement, the Romanian set of lexical units favours the conceptualization of the economic activity as less dynamic, seen in terms of gain / loss and in terms of a change in quantity rather than in position, expressed by a more limited set of verbs of relation and development and comparatively very few verbs of motion, revealing an instance of interlinguistic asymmetry. The question that arises is to what extent the way economists talk about the reality, these image schemas bear on the economic activity in Romania vs. the Anglo-Saxon world and whether economic performance may be estimated or predicted from the choice of vocabulary specialists decide to use in describing economic activities. References BOERS, Frank, Murielle Demecheleer (1997). A Few Metaphorical Models in (Western) Economic Discourse, in Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol 154, Wolf Andreas Liebert, Gisela Rediker, Linda Waugh (Eds.), Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company DIXON, R. M. W. (1991). A New Approach to English Grammar, on Semantic Principles, Oxford: Clarendon Press DOBROTĂ, Iulia-Corina (2006). Probleme ale metaforei în discursul economic (teză de doctorat, nepublicată) EVSEEV, Ioan (1974). Semantica Verbului – categoriile de acţiune, devenire şi stare, Timişoara: Editura Facla HOLLINGER, Alexander (2000). Test Your Business English Vocabulary, Bucureşti: Teora, IGL, Vladimir (1989), Synonymy in the language of Business and Economics, in Christer Lauren & Marianne Nordman, Multilingual Matters (Eds.), Special Languages: From Human Thinking to Thinking machines, Philadelphia: Clevedon IRIMIA, Dumitru (1997). Gramatica limbii române, Iaşi:Polirom KERMAS, Susan (2006). Metaphor and Ideology in Business and Economic Discourse in British and American English, in J. Flowerdew & M Gotti (Eds.), Studies in Specialised Discourse, Bern: Peter Lang KERRIDGE, David (1988). Presenting Facts and Figures, Longman MANEA, Constantin, Maria-Camelia Manea (2006). Aspecte ale reromanizării lexicului limbii române contemporane prin afluxul neologic şi de termeni tehnico-ştiinţifici, in Mariana Flaişer (coord.), Direcţii în cercetarea filologică românească, Casa Editorială Iaşi: Demiurg MCCLOSKEY, Donald (1986). The Rhetoric of Economics, Harvester Press McCLOSKEY, Donald. (1993). The Rhetoric of Economic Expertise, in Henderson, Willie, Tony DUDLEY-EVANS and Roger Backhouse (Eds.), The Recovery of Rhetoric. Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, 1993, Economics and Language, London: Routledge. RESCHE, Catherine 1999, Equivocal Economic Terms or Terminology Revisited. Meta, 44, nr. 4, 617-632 Retrieved August 17 2007, from http://www.gitrad.uji.es/common/articles/Resche.pdf 316