CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF BORROWED WORDS IN THE LIGHT OF THE THEORY OF LANGUAGE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE WORLD

The work studies basic principles of cultural appropriation of foreign elements in speech practice of contemporary Russian native speakers. The author proceeds from the point that a sort of distorting semantic and axiological spheres of loanwords as signs of “alien” values or diverse cultural models of behavior is quite typical of Russian language as reflection of typically Russian ways to look at things. “Emblematic” (in some sense) loanwords (terms, ideologems, axiologems etc.) receive obligatory cultural appropriation in discursive practice of contemporary Russian native speakers in the spirit of primordially Russian models of language conceptualization of the world. Such basic dominants of Russian “semantic universe” as: set on empathy (in Russian substantive and adjective diminutives), excessive hyperbolization (in Russian intensificators and augmentatives), overgrowth of general, moral or esthetic evaluation in nomination of persons, things or events, acute reaction to false, from the standpoint of a native speaker, value or pretension, correlation of the very simple things, properties, processes or phenomena with high spiritual ideals, ironic distorting in the spirit of “carnivalization” etc. — are being actualized even when foreign elements come into contemporary Russian speech practice. The evidence of this is specificity of word formative adoption of foreign nomination, that is phenomena of occasional derivation by typically Russian models of expressive wordformation in the basis of foreign stems, such as smile-, self-, friend-etc. Hereat there are culturally conditioned connotative-evaluative increments of sense in derivative word with foreign components, and these sense increments use primordially Russian cultural sets and evaluative stereotypes.