ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЯ КАК АСПЕКТ КУЛЬТУРНО-ЯЗЫКОВОГО ПЕРЕНОСА В КОНТАКТНОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

Abstract

The article explores borrowings in terms of linguacultural transfer in the ethnic (Russian) fiction written in the English language, the material being works of Helen Litman, an American writer of Russian-Jewish ancestry. The research significance is related to communicative value of the original culture both for interpretation of the author’s style and purport as well as for developing the theory of Russian English in terms of the World Englishes paradigm. Since the primary message of H. Liman’s writings is the difficulty of integrating into a new reality, reference to the past is embodied in numerous cases of lexical and conceptual borrowings. The author explores such types of loans as exoticisms describing Russian prototypical historical, and everyday life concepts which are absent in American culture; Russian transcribed words including exclamations, slang words, incorporated in the texts; zoonyms as a particular case of conceptual borrowings, and phraseological calques. Numerous examples are conditioned by the absence of Russian culture-specific concepts in American linguacultural continuum. Traces of transferring cultural identity in bilingual writers’ fiction, which are found in this article, make it possible to infer the author’s purport as well as broaden the research field of contact fiction.