The Adaptation of Loan Interjection <i>wow</i> in the Russian Language through the Prism of Modern Explanatory Dictionary: From Slang to Everyday Speech, from Everyday Speech to Terminology

Abstract

The article considers the adaptation process of the loan interjection wow that was borrowed into Russian from American English in the early 1990s and at first was mostly used as slang, but later on it entered everyday speech. The research is carried out as a part of the project aimed at exploring the lexis of the modern Russian language, i.e. its main functional and chronological varieties and lexical categories with the use of “The Dictionary of the 21st Century Russian Language”. The novelty and specificity of the investigation lies in a comprehensive study of Russian lexis using a new approach “from dictionary to language” in contrast to the traditional one “from language to dictionary”. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the potential of this principle in practice, that is to describe some interesting phenomena in modern Russian using the material of several entries, – namely вау (wow), вау- (wow-), вау-эффект (wow effect), вау-фактор (wow factor) – selected from the dictionary mentioned above. This series clearly demonstrates the phenomena typical of modern Russian, that is the blurring of the boundaries between colloquial speech and other stylistic registers and the active interpenetration of words from one stylistic variety to another. The analysis of the dictionary entries revealed the gradual process of penetration of the interjection wow into the Russian language through its adaptation. It may be converted into a noun, a predicative or an analytic adjective, it may be reduplicated to indicate the intensity of surprise/ admiration, it may be used as a productive derivational element and even as a component of some special terms. This process is extraordinary for the Russian language, since, firstly, it affects one of the most stable groups of lexical items, and secondly, it is associated with acquiring a terminological meaning by a word component initially used as an exclamation to express a certain emotion. These new linguistic processes are largely due to the influence of the English language. This influence is so great that we can observe not only an active penetration of the Anglo-American interjection wow into the Russian everyday speech – emotive interjections were hardly ever borrowed – but also its integration into the Russian word-formation system.