Considerations on the Renewal of Repeated Discourse: Recent Fixed Constructions

Fixed constructions (idioms, proverbs, sayings, collocations), which are part of repeated discourse, are considered to belong to a direction of natural language use opposite to creativity: the speaker "takesfor granted" the constructions, lexically recognized as independent units, with an often non-transparent meaning, which must be learned by native or non-native speakers like the meaning of any unknown words. In current Romanian, especially in its spoken language variants, there is a tendency to alter the standard form of some phraseologisms with various intentions: to produce humor, irony, sarcasm, word games, as well as to transmit some negative referential information in an indirect way. At the same time, the emergence of new fixed constructions is observed, which, frequently taken over by speakers, enrich the inventory of repeated discourse.