Linguistics and politics: Russianisms in the western English-Language political discourse with Russia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2686-830X-2021-3-2-138-152Keywords:
lexicon of political discourse, assimilation, naturalization, Sovietology, Kremlinology, interonyms, lexical and grammatical transformationAbstract
The article examines the influence of modern Russian political vocabulary on English. In fact, the influence of Russian on English is insignificant. Reasons: The Mongol conquest, the belated appearance of Russia on the European political scene, the subsequent confrontation between the West and Russia. Political vocabulary occupies a special place in this process. The analysis is carried out on the material of authoritative general purpose dictionaries, primarily the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). According to OED, it is the political theme that predominates in loans from Russian. The significance of this influence increased in the 20th c. after the formation of the USSR, which eventually led to increased attention of Western specialists (“Sovietologists” or “Kremlinologists”) to Russia. A sharply negative attitude towards Russia is usually evident in the introduction of a negative component into borrowed Russianisms (mainly loans and calques), e. g.: such derivatives like “Bolshie”. It is also evident in the borrowing “Russki”, which lexicographers accompany by the label “derogatory”. Those Russianisms which turn out to be short-lived in Russian, cease to be marked by the corresponding labels by English lexicographers, passing into the category of historicisms (“monolith”) and / or dissolving in the semantics of the corresponding English word (“norm”). Meanwhile some Russianisms are becoming so frequent in English-language political polemics that they often go beyond the boundaries of Russian culture: “apparatus”, “cadre”. Russianisms belonging to international vocabulary (cadre, apparatus, collective, liquidate, deficit) are easily assimilated. As a result, words that, for example, were originally used only as financial terms (liquidate, deficit), acquire a new semantic specialization. Sometimes English words under the influence of the Russian language acquire an additional meaning: “purge”, “show trial”, while some Russianisms, although forgotten in their native Russian culture, take root well on the new cultural soil (“fellow-traveler”).
References
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Gaeng, P. A. (1971) Introduction to the principles of language. New York: Harper and Row Publ., 383 p. (In English)
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