ON SOME SOCIO-PRAGMATIC DIMENSIONS OF BORROWING FROM ENGLISH INTO SERBIAN

Abstract

The recent pragmatic turn in the research on language contact and linguistic borrowing emphasizes the role of discourse, the speakers’ motivations and the social context, along with the structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects. Following the theoretical framework postulated in Andersen (2014), Andersen et al. (2017), Peterson (2017), Peterson, Beers Fagersten (2018), and focusing on the borrowing of pragmatic markers from English into Serbian, this article discusses several, often interrelated phenomena, which have been identified as associated with pragmatic borrowing. They are the functional shift (in particular, the weakening of the illocutionary force and the narrowing of the scope of use of the borrowed pragmatic items), semantic bleaching, indexing of particular social identities, and licensing of certain linguistic and social behaviours, possibly unsuitable with the use of native Serbian pragmatic markers. The article provides numerous illustrative contextualized examples of English pragmatic markers borrowed into Serbian, extracted from various electronic sources of written Serbian. They include the politeness markers pliz and sori, the expletives shit, fuck and the related forms such as who/what the fuck, wtf, and the abbreviations omg and rip, which are examined in their pragmatic, semantic, and social aspects.