Influence of Multi-Word Calques on Russian and Czech – Comparative Study

Abstract

The paper deals with English, Czech, and Russian one- and multi-word expressions. Its objective is to describe and analyze their interaction based on the degree of their mutual semantic proximity as well as many detailed models of one- and multi-word combinations within the selected field of lexical units of the same or nearly the same meaning. The examples used were taken from a self-created unique dictionary containing several thousands of Czech and Russian one- and multi-word lexical units which have been gathered by the authors since 2008. The authors try to explain more analytic character of selected Russian naming units due to certain influence of English and other languages manifested by existence of multi-word calques in Russian by comparing them with often more synthetic character of these expressions in Czech as another Slavic language. The research revealed the occurrence of multi-word calques in Russian. The authors´ hypothesis on significant influence of English and other languages on Russian and thus the existence of certain typological differences between Russian and Czech was confirmed. This study seems to be the first detailed comparative linguistics one of its kind.

Keywords

• Multi-word calques
• English
• Czech
• Russian
• typological differences