THE LIFE AND FATE OF THE CALQUES OF THE XVIII CENTURY: CORPUS RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

The article examines the process of semantic loan translation based on corpus data of the Russian language of the 18th–19th centuries. The emphasis is put not on the appearance of a linguistic unit i. e. the loan translation in the language, but on its following existence in it. Diff erent stages of adaptation of the loanword to the morpho-syntactic system, lexical competition of the new words with others as well as the causes of its disappearance from the usage are considered. The material of our research was the polysemic word raspolozhenie ‘disposition’, which polysemantic structure has undergone signifi cant changes since it entered the language. These changes were carefully examined using corpus and dictionary data, as well as data from the The V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; sets of contexts for each historical period of the life of this word were determined. This made it possible to consider the lexeme raspolozhenie ‘disposition’ on the basis of extensive data from European historical corpora and academic dictionaries. The coincidence of the collocability and grammatical characteristics of the calques in the recipient language and the target lexemes in the source language, on the one hand, and taking into account extralinguistic data, on the other hand, allowed us to determine the time and language of calquing. Corpus evidence of subsequent diff erences between the characteristics of the source and the recipient allows us to talk about models of diachronic changes in calques.