Necessary loans – luxury loans? Exploring the pragmatic dimension of borrowing

Departing from the traditional and controversial distinction between necessary and luxury loans, this paper proposes a differentiation into catachrestic and non-catachrestic innovations which mirror two general pragmatic effects of borrowings. As such, the paper deconstructs the notions of necessary and luxury loans and proposes a new set of terms rooted in rhetorical tradition. At the same time, the criterion of semantic equivalence between borrowings and existing terms in a language is taken as a valid starting point for categorizing loans as catachrestic and non-catachrestic. Levinson's theory of presumptive meanings supports this distinction since catachrestic anglicisms in German (e.g. E-Mail, Computer, and Internet) mainly bear I-implicatures (of informativeness) whereas borrowings such as cool, Kids, and Airport evoke M-implicatures (of manner) as marked lexical choices. This pragmatic framework is tested on about 100 highly frequent anglicisms in German. The study combines the consultation of major reference works with the analysis of usage-based data from a German newsmagazine corpus and the Internet. While the results show that a basic pragmatic classification of anglicisms in German is possible, usage-based evidence highlights that I- and M-implicatures are interwoven in a number of cases and that the pragmatic values of borrowings are susceptible to change over time.