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Widening of Lexical Meaning in Russian Loanwards

Kang Ducksoo 1,  Lee Sung-Min 1

1한국외국어대학교

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ABSTRACT

Russian language tends to be quite open to borrowing. In Russian it has been for a long time the conventional way of expanding the lexicon, accepting many words from adjacent languages, including Church Slavic. In the contemporary Russian English has been the main source for loanwords. There are several linguistic factors for lexical borrowing: 1. the necessity of denominating new facts, phenomena or concepts, 2. the necessity of differentiating concepts, 3. the necessity of specializing new concepts, 4. the introduction of new international terms, 5. the increase of periphrastic expressions, 6. the needs for the more elegant and modern words. These factors have caused borrowing to enlarge the component of the lexicon and phrasal expressions, but excessive use of foreign words has brought about negative effects such as linguistic pollution. Some borrowed words are assimilated without serious conflicts, but other words undergo semantic changes in confrontation to existing words of similar meanings. These types of semantic changes comprise total change of meaning, reduction of semantic scale and extension of meaning. Semantic changes are caused by linguistic factors such as lexical conflict with existing words or by socio-culural factors such as misunderstanding of foreign words. And extension of meaning shows two types: qualitative extension and quantitative extension. The first means extending the semantic scope of a borrowed word and the latter - increasing the number of its sememe. In contemporary Russian language we can witness two productive phenomena:qualitative extension by socio-cultural factors, in which words with negative nuances are changed into those with positive ones and professional terms become common words, losing their professional meanings. On the other hand, by quantative extension some loanwords change their concrete meanings into abstract ones. In such cases loanwords acquire the additional meanings of abstractness, putting aside their original concrete meanings as the basic. On the contrary, the qualitative extension of adding the special meaning to general words or giving the concrete meaning to abstract words is not productive. And it is rarely witnessed that words of positive nuances are negatively used. It is considered that such cases are partly restricted in the spoken language or the jargon. Such phenomena may happen by the incomplete understanding of English words.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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