Blog as a Source of Recent Anglicisms: Internet Discourse of Fashion

Abstract

The paper dwells on the possibility of using a blog as a source of recent English loanwords and their new meanings in the modern Russian language. In the frame of researching internet discourse of fashion, the article is focusing on studying blogs as a resource of finding new Anglicisms and their meanings, which are not included into dictionaries. The modern Russian language tends to intensify the process of borrowing English lexical units and their semantics, which brings about the need of their lexicographic description. In Russia, the most detailed and well-developed source of English loanwords is the Dictionary of Anglicisms of the Russian Language composed by A. I. Dyakov who included there both the loanwords and derived from them neologisms. Information technologies development and introduction of new platforms for Internet communication boost the assimilation of English loanwords and their meanings and necessitate familiarizing with modern resources for searching, researching and fixation of Anglicisms. In this work, blogs on fashion stand for the resource allocated on the «LiveJournal» platform. Given the intensification of both Anglicisms and their new semantics borrowing, the research is targeting not only on recent English loanwords study, but on the assimilated ones as well. The analysis of 280 blog texts from six blogs of 2014-2018 in Russian fashion discourse revealed a group of old English loanwords that show new meanings, not included into the Dictionary. Another finding is a group of recent derivatives, which demonstrate the efficiency of Russian word formation patterns and confirm the ability of the Russian language to assimilate foreign words by extending their stylistic and semantic potential by means of Russian affixation. This result allows us to conclude that a blog is a rich resource for researching borrowings. The prospect of allocating new loanwords and their derivatives in a specific discourse provides an opportunity for deeper understanding of the loanwords semantic assimilation by the Russian language.