ROST AND ROSTO: LEXICULTURAL (DIS)SIMILARITY IN ROMANIAN AND PORTUGUESE

Words travel through history and cultures and change their meanings according to their social and cultural use. The Romanian rost and the Portuguese rosto are believed to make a convincing case for the importance of sociocultural and historical contexts in triggering semantic changes, which may happen due to some general mental associative patterns: although they share the same Latin root, their current main meanings, ‘face’ in Portuguese and ‘purpose’ in Romanian, are far apart. Employing instruments from historical, comparative, and cognitive linguistics, the study shows how different historical and social settings can lead to considerable semantic differences between the two almost identical word forms.