Dominant models of semantic changes in English-language borrowings of the Petrine era
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2025-6-55-66
Research interest in borrowings of the Petrine time remains due to fairly large number of rooted words and their significant impact on the development of the Russian language. The purpose of this work is to determine the main ways of semantic development of English-language borrowings of the Petrovsky time by analyzing their semantic changes and adaptation tools in the Russian language system. As an object of the study, the article discusses the nature and methods of semantic changes in English-language borrowings of the Petrine era in a diachronic aspect. The main focus of the study is aimed at identifying dominant models of semantic changes, namely, the prevailing schemes for transformating the meaning of English-language borrowings of the Petrine time since their penetration in the system of the Russian language. Selected for the research by random sampling from the first dictionaries and glossaries the early English-language borrowings were analyzed by the method of comparative analysis with their etymons, classified by the types of semantic shifts as well there was identified the most active period of their use by studying their frequency with the corpus analysis method. According to the research there were identified two large categories of English-language borrowings reflecting the range of their semantic mobility. The borrowings having a low ipm and often keeping the connection with their English etymons relate to the first category with weak semantic mobility. These are the words that mean special terms borrowed without any semantic changes. Subsequently such words as sea terms, scientific, economic, administrative terms and names of measurements don’t have semantic mobility in the language-recipient. The words not relating to the Russian reality turn out to be semantically unmovable and then leave the Russian language vocabulary as outdated words. Different barbarisms can belong to this category too. Another category consists of entrenched borrowings that have changed structurally and semantically during the adaptation process. Most of them have high frequency of use and good semantic mobility, using their polysemic potential and changing one or several meanings.
Keywords: Petrine loanwords, English borrowings, Anglicisms, semantic changes, semantic shift, combined semantic shift, dominant models, adaptation process
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