MADAM: THE CONNOTATIVE POTENTIAL OF A LOANWORD

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Russian court had assimilated the model of the French court and, more broadly, of the secular world. As early as the beginning of the 18th century the word madame was borrowed as a title in the forms мадама (1705), мадам (1708) and мадаме (1728). Expanding its functioning throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the borrowed noun мадам was used in both status and non-status meanings. Marking diff erent social roles, it also refl ected Russian realities proper (governess, foreign companion, modiste, merchant), but, unlike in French, it did not develop any specific connotations. However, in modern language the word мадам can be used in marked ironic contexts, especially in combination with a proper name. The origins of these uses date back, apparently, to the 20s of the 20th century, in particular, to the famous novel «The Twelve Chairs» by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Specifi c connotations of the word madam in the modern Russian language are explained by the duality of its perception: on the one hand, the familiarity of the word to the Russian ear, and on the other hand, its obvious correlation with a foreign social vocabulary.