Assimilation of foreign neologisms in the modern Russian language under extra-linguistic influence (on the example of computer-mediated educational discourse)

The article describes modern educational discourse and discusses influence of some extra-linguistic factors (international integration in the area of education, high level of foreign language awareness among Russian youth, dynamic development and adaptation of new technology, appearance of new forms of education, especially e-learning and distance learning) on the process of assimilation and functioning of some recent foreign neologisms (borrowed words) in the modern Russian language. The research was carried out in the lexical-semantic field education. Lexemes, borrowed into the Russian language in the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries as well as their contexts were extracted from open documents - lectures, slides and announcements -of Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech). Interpretation of the borrowed lexical units and their field classification brings the author to the conclusion that 39 % of the foreign words are doublets or synonyms to some existing words that are Russian by origin or were borrowed into the Russian language previously. A linguistic experiment was carried out in order to evaluate the level of assimilation of the selected foreign lexemes in the Russian language. Another important objective of the survey was to identify common characteristics of the assimilation process in different groups of respondents. The experiment proved that the borrowed units actively produce new words in the conditions of insufficient semantic adaptation. The words that formed the greatest number of derivatives among the neologisms were defined by only 44 % of the respondents. At the average the level of semantic assimilation of the analyzed words reached only 50 % of the total number of received responses. Low semantic integration is also obvious from unclear interpretations of the lexemes by the respondents. The experiment did not establish any significant difference in interpretations of foreign nominations among different groups of respondents. Therefore, the obtained results reflect the common trends in recent development of the Russian language and cannot be related to the linguistic competence of Skoltech students solely. In conclusion, field description, interpretation of the selected lexical items and the linguistic experiment proved redundancy of linguistic elements at early assimilation stages. Besides, some indicators of high-level assimilation of foreign neologisms have been observed in the conditions of their low semantic adaptation contrary to a typical assimilation sequence.

Keywords

Authors

References