Morphological Peculiarities of Lexical Units of English Origin in Contemporary Russian Slang: Dictionary and Corpus Analyses

Abstract

The paper deals with lexical units of English origin that have penetrated into contemporary Russian slang with the emphasis on their morphological features. The spread of these words in the Russian language provides a scientist with a linguistically challenging material since the English and Russian languages represent typologically diverse language systems. To begin with, the research focuses on the ratio of individual word classes within the studied material together with the representation of individual grammatical genders throughout. As nouns represent the most numerous group of the adapted lexemes, the main emphasis is put on their morphological adaptation into the Russian language, and at the same time, their most common morphological features are listed. The following traits belong to the marginal ones from the point of view of word classes: an Anglicism may be a component of several word classes and the here-studied Anglicisms only exceptionally do not keep their original categorial meanings. Additionally, they display differences in onomasiological categories across the studied field. Morphological features of Anglicisms in Russian slang are the combination of Russian and English morphological aspects of individual word classes. Furthermore, words borrowed from English acquire grammatical categories typical of their corresponding counterparts in the Russian language. As a final point, most Anglicisms in the Russian slang undergo conjugation and declination processes (98,5% of instances). The possible utilization of the research is noticeable in the areas of comparative and corpus linguistics and translatology when searching for equivalents of words in typologically different languages. What is more, its results are applicable in the methodology of teaching foreign languages. The whole linguistic material is investigated in the framework of the online dictionary of slang and the text corpus Russian Web 2011 (ruTenTen11) with the help of the search tool Sketch Engine. To reveal the complex sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic functioning of the Anglicisms in contemporary Russian slang, further research needs to be conducted.

Keywords

• anglicism
• russian slang
• word class
• lexical unit
• grammatical category
• noun
• adaptation
• corpus