The cognitive enterprise in Romania

The paper focuses on some cognitive linguistic topics (e.g. categorization, polysemy, motivation of idioms, etc.) approached by Romanian linguists in the last two decades. The selection of contributions that this paper presents is intended to offer an overview of the main attempts to introduce and develop cognitive linguistics in Romania. The claims put forward for English (especially American English) have been contrasted and checked against data from Romanian. Generally, Romanian studies from a cognitive linguistic perspective shed light on various linguistic phenomena at both a theoretical and a practical level. Theoretically, they are relevant through their comparative and contrastive analyses, while practically they contribute insights to language acquisition and translation studies.