Quantitative characteristics of Russian vocabulary internationalization

The article is devoted to the competition of borrowed and native vocabulary in the Russian language in the 18th–20th centuries. The relevance of the study: due to the large number of non-native speakers, the etymological picture of Russian vocabulary is somewhat shifted towards the dominance of internationalisms, characterized by their universality and conventionality in most languages. This fact predetermines a spontaneous transformation of the typical lexical tools of scientific, official business and journalistic speech, and calls for the need to change the lexicographic norms.
Our analysis has shown that internationalisms, denoting already existing concepts, can displace native words, especially in literary speech. The article identifies linguistic patterns in lexical combinability of native and borrowed words, and determines stylistic differences between them. When working with text corpora, we have revealed discrepancies in syntactic combinability between synonyms, which allows us to state the stylistic demarcation of borrowings and native Russian words. Etymological synharmonism and connotation show the way words of different genesis form context. We studied the change in the frequency of native and borrowed words’ usage in diachrony using text corpora.
As a result, we have come to the following conclusions: borrowed words have a clearer semantic orientation in the Russian language; they are characterized by a lower frequency and narrow combinability. We have analyzed the cases of native lexemes’ displacement by foreign-language borrowings from the point of view of their frequency growth dynamics in the corpus. We have determined the average duration of the period, during which a foreign word exceeds its analog frequency of the Slavic origin in book speech – 40-60 years. The results obtained are important for studying the deep changes in society, since we are talking about internationalisms that denote already existing social phenomena or objects.

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