Microsoft Word 81843-1179932786- mstyblo thesis0516

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The main source of data used in this thesis is the Russian National Corpus orRuscorpora.A language corpus is a collection of texts that represent a language at aspecific time or times.Ruscorpora contains texts of many genres, styles, and territorialand social variants, dating from the early 19^thcentury to early 21^stcentury.The genresrepresented include literary works, journalistic and educational writing, correspondence,memoirs and diaries.Ruscorpora also includes texts of various literary styles and manyspoken,colloquialandregionaldialects.Thereareseveraladvantagestousingalanguagecorpusasopposedtoothersourcesoflanguagecontent,suchasspokenlanguage or Internet content.The corpus material has been produced by native speakers,ithas been checkedforerrors anddoes not contain anyduplicates.

The Russian National Corpus was created by linguists specifically for the purposeof language research.It is modeled after the British National Corpus (British NationalCorpus2007)andtheCzechNationalCorpus(CzechNationalCorpus2007).Ruscorpora gives a good representation of the Russian language because it contains abalanced selection of a variety of types of written and spoken texts: literary, artistic,journalistic, educational, scientific, business, spoken and dialectical.These styles are allcontained in the corpus in approximate proportion to their prevalence in the language in aspecific period.Ruscorpora texts contain around 200 million words, enough to give anaccuratesampleofthelanguage.
Each text contained in the corpus has been grammatically marked, processed andcategorizedformorphology.Sometextsevenhaveprosodicstressmarkings.TheavailabilityofthisinformationmakesRuscorporaveryusefulforthestudyoflanguage
andseparatesitfromotheravailablecollectionsoftexts,whosemaingoalistherepresentation of the texts’ content.The compilers of the corpus did consider each text’sentertainment, artistic or educational properties, but these were not the important reasonsfor incorporating a text into the corpus.The main goal was to facilitate the study of thelanguage,lexiconand languagechangeasittakesplaceoveroneortwocenturies.
Computer technology allows for the high speed and efficiency of large-volumesearchersandstatisticalanalysisofelectronictextswithinRuscorpora.AlthoughRuscorpora is most often used by researchers and linguists, even non-professionals canuseittoretrievestatisticaldataaboutaparticulartimeperiod,author,grammaticalconstruction or lexical item. The corpus is also useful for educational purposes, becauseitallowsstudentstofindexamplesoffunctional,everydayusesofanyword(Natsional'nyjKorpus RusskogoIazyka).
In order to reduce the complexity of analysis, I focused on loanword nouns fromEnglish that entered the Russian language within approximately the last 50 years.Tomaximize the data available for analysis, I chose loanwords that occur most frequently inthe Russian National Corpus.Some of these loanwords have been used in the Russianlanguagewithincreasingfrequencyforlongerperiodsoftime(6изhecмeh‘businessman’, aм6иция ‘ambition’), and others have become very popular very recently(мeheджep ‘manager’, peйtиhг ‘rating’).I also chose words that represent people andconcepts that are not neutral, where there is a chance the word is used either in a positiveor negative connotation.This motivated the selection of words like киллep ‘killer’ andavoidance of words like пpиhtep ‘printer’.In my analysis I hope to show that EnglishloanwordsandRussiancounterpartsoftendifferinmeaning,andthatsometimeswecan
makeassumptionsabouttheirconnotationsandchancesofsurvivalbasedontheanalysisoftheircontexts.