Microsoft Word 81843-1179932786- mstyblo thesis0516

BACKGROUND

Overview

To understand how English loanwords enter the Russian language it is necessaryto know both the theory behind language contact as well as its long history in Russia.Language contact is the interaction of speakers of two languages, through both direct andindirect contact.Depending on the nature and intensity of this contact, a language changecan occur, as one language adopts words or features of another.Even the least intenseforms of language contact can result in lexical borrowings or loanwords, the focus of thisthesis.During the interaction of target language speakers with source language speakers,or with media that uses the source language, new words can be introduced into the targetlanguage.When a word enters a target language it can do so in several ways.The twoways relevant to this thesis are lexical addition and lexical replacement.Lexical additiontakesplacewhenaloanwordentersalanguagewhereithasnonativecounterpartwiththesamemeaning.Thissituationiscommonwhenaforeignitemorconceptisintroduced to a target culture along with the foreign word that describes it.Lexicalreplacementtakesplacewhenanativecounterpartwiththesamemeaningastheloanword already exists in the target language.In this case, lexical competition takesplace as the target language speakers decide whether to use the foreign loanword or itsnativecounterpart.

Language contact, language change and lexical borrowings have occurred all overthe world and Russia is no exception.The sources of lexical borrowings did not remainconstant, as French, German, and English were each at one time the most the popularsource of borrowings.But even once English became most popular, the intensity ofborrowings from it varied, as Russia suffered through two World Wars and a Cold Warand underwent two revolutions of ideology.These events helped to shape the attitudes ofRussian speakers towards borrowings from English.It was during the times of change,like the 1917 revolution or the collapse of communism in 1991, that using new foreignwords to describe new foreign concepts was seen as common sense and acceptable.ButaftertheendofWWIIorduringtheheightoftheColdWarwhentheattitudestowardsthe West and the United States were particularly negative, so were the attitudestowardsforeignloanwords.During thesetimesitwascommonplaceforthegovernmenttoinstitute linguistic policies that aimed to remove foreign borrowings from Russian orreplace them with native counterparts.While these efforts were not always successful,they negatively affected the loanwords’ chances of survival in the language by limitingtheirexposureto thepublic.
Often as a result of lexical competition, one word emerges as the most popular,and the other either fades away as an archaism or remains used in a narrow or restrictedmeaning.By analyzing the frequency with which loanwords and counterparts are used indifferent contexts, we can determine their exact meanings and whether or not they aredifferent.This will later help us to determine the nature and the result of their lexicalcompetition.Previousworkshavedefinedlanguagecontact(Thomason2001),chronicledtheuseofEnglish loanwordsinRussia (Comrie1996),usedgrammaticalform
frequenciestocomparethemeaningsofRussiansynonyms(Solovyev,Jandaforthcoming), and analyzed the linguistic nature of adjectives (Featherstone 1994).I willdraw upon all of these works to prepare the background information and method for myanalysisofEnglish loanwordusein modern Russianlanguage.