"Dragoste" and "Iubire" : love in the layperson model of native speakers of Romanian

In a preliminary study aimed at outlining the organization of affective categories in Romanian, several cases were identified where Romanians made use of two or more competing linguistic terms applied to what appeared to be the same conceptual configuration . One such case is taken into consideration in this 5-study follow-up investigation, whose purpose was to obtain empirical data for establishing the conceptual configuration underlying the two natural language categories dragoste (‘love 1’) and iubire (‘love 2’). More specifically, this study aims at clarifying: 1) To what extent the descriptions of the two Romanian categories overlap; 2) To what extent each (or both) of the two Romanian categories overlap with the equivalent English category "love", as this results from similar studies. 3) To what extent both or only one of the two dimensions of prototypicality – horizontal vs. vertical – are needed for the description of basic-level categories, taking into account the specific properties of these in contrast with those featured by superordinate-level categories.