Microsoft Word 81843-1179932786- mstyblo thesis0516

METHODOLOGY

Overview

The main focus of this thesis is to study the use of English loanwords in theRussianlanguage.Themethodchosentoaccomplishthistaskiscontentanalysis,because it is best suited for searching through large amounts of textual data and analyzingword frequencies.This method becomes more efficient and fruitful when used with anelectronic source of data, such as the Russian National Corpus. This corpus containslarge amounts of electronic Russian texts that are searchable for single words, wordcombinations and parts of speech.This chapter outlines the data collection and analysisprocessand presents apilot studythat tests it.

Method

To accomplish the goals of this thesis it is be necessary to examine Englishloanwords in the Russian language and determine how they differ from their nativecounterparts.It is also necessary to track loanword use to determine how loanwords areadopted into the language and how they compete with their native counterparts.The dataobtained should allow for predictions about which English loanwords will be more easilyadopted into the Russian language.The methodology best suited to these tasks is contentanalysis(alsocalledtextualanalysis)(ContentAnalysis2007),withRussianNational

CorpusorRuscorpora(Natsional'nyjKorpusRusskogoIazyka)asthemainsourceofdata.
Content analysis or textual analysis is the standard methodology in the socialsciencesforthestudyofcommunicationandlanguage.Itisusedtodeterminethefrequency of specific words within a text or set of texts.From the word frequencies,meanings and relationships, researchers can make conclusions about the text, the writer,the audience and even the culture of which this text was a part.Combined with the use ofcomputers, content analysis allows for speedy analysis of large amounts of text.Whilemethods in quantitative content analysis result in quantitative statistical data, qualitativecontent analysis focuses more on intentionality and its implications.For effective contentanalysisitisimportantforthetextualinformationtobecodedwithinaconsistentframework.
Theusesofcontentanalysisfallintothreebasiccategories:

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  makeinferencesabouttheantecedentsof acommunication
  

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  describeandmakeinferencesaboutthecharacteristicsofacommunication
  

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  makeinferencesabouttheeffectsof acommunication
  

I willusecontentanalysistodescribecharacteristicsofacommunicationascontained in the Russian National Corpus. I will examine the loanwords within thecorpus and make inferences about trends in loanword use and loanwordnativization intheRussian language.