Russian lexical and collocative calques in the Czech and Polish insular dialects in Russia

Abstract

The paper reports on a study of immigrant Czech and Polish dialects in Russia that have been strongly influenced by the dominant language of their surroundings. The author discusses problems detecting Russian lexical calques in the examined dialects, in particular differentiating calques and adapted borrowings. These difficulties appear to be due to the close affinity of the Russian language and the influenced dialects, which have common Slavic origin. The article proposes approaches for solving the problems by observing various aspects of calque formation, taking into consideration the fact that the border between the analyzed phenomena is vague and the calques are often firmly bounded with certain collocations. There are numerous transitional phenomena at the intersection of lexical calques and adapted borrowings, such as hybrid formations, formations in which the Russian affixal or root morphemes are transformed based on regular correspondences between idioms, cases of the formation of new lexical units in the recipient idiom according to the Russian model based on the semantics of correlated morphemes. In order to adequately describe such phenomena, it is proposed to introduce a more general concept of “collocative calques”.