Semantic Analysis of English Loanwords in Communication on the Social Networking Website Facebook

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the semantic analysis of Еnglish loanwords at a lexeme level in communication on facebook. This quantitative research was accomplished within the scope of contact linguistics and indirect borrowing with the aim of determining the degree of semantic adaptation of English loanwords in the receiving language. The results show that the majority of lexemes complete the process of integration at the level of primary adaptation (79.03%), owing to the time-consuming nature of secondary adaptation, which demands an integration of loanwords into the receiving language. Due to the fact that loanwords are borrowed in specific contexts and tend to transfer only one aspect of its original meaning into the receiving language, the semantic narrowing is the most frequently found mechanism of primary adaptation (82.44%). The majority of loanwords [170/202] are adapted by narrowing the number of original meanings. The prominence of meaning specification is illustrated by 74.69% of loanwords borrowing only one lexeme meaning or submeaning. On the other hand, 5 mechanisms of secondary adaptation are: widening of semantic field [20/65]; widening of the number of original meanings [17/65]; pejoration [2/65]; ellipsis [25/65] and metaphor [1/65].