SEMANTIC TRANSFORMATIONS AS A SOURCE OF PICTURESQUENESS OF THE LANGUAGE OF BANKING

Summary: The objective of this paper is to underline the expressiveness of the language of profession and science - an extremely important, but frequently neglected and insufficiently explored characteristic, both of the English and Serbian language of banking. Expressiveness, i.e. picturesqueness of the language of banking, is based on semantic transformation, mostly induced by metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, whereas within our research by referring to semantic transformation we would also imply the figurative usage of specialized lexemes. We have examined this phenomenon both from the micro-linguistic (contrastive linguistics) and macro-linguistic (sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and linguo-stylistics) perspective. The examples of semantic transformation were divided into two groups. The first group of examples contains the forms of transformation within the registry collocation, mostly noun compounds. The second group does not involve any registry words and semantic transformation is fully implicit. Our analysis has shown that, both in the English and Serbian language of banking, there is a whole set of rather creative, witty and, thus, unique expressions, which, though predominantly belonging to some stylistically marked, lexical-pragmatic groups, embody the true riches of the language of profession and science.