Abstract
This chapter investigates the situation of language change in contemporary Russian with a particular focus on value words. Using data from the Russian National Corpus, it analyses the meaning of the word tolerantnyj which has been borrowed from English. It compares its meaning with the English tolerant as a source of borrowing and the traditional Russian term terpimyj. The chapter demonstrates a shift in meaning in the borrowed term, which allows it to accommodate to the Russian value system. The meanings of the terms in question are formulated using universal meanings employed in Minimal English, which makes the comparison transparent and explicit.
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Notes
- 1.
I will only analyse the use of the words in the area of social cognition and will ignore their use as a physical bodily reaction.
- 2.
Some parts of this work have been previously published in Gladkova (2008). The analysis has been revisited and reviewed, particularly in line with the Minimal English development as an offshoot of NSM. The parts from Gladkova (2008) are reproduced with the permission of the publisher John Benjamins.
- 3.
In this study, we use data from Standard modern Russian as spoken across Russian Federation and represented in the RNC main written and oral subcorpora. Historically, it is the main standardized language variety used across Russia (Beyer 2001). Dialectal differences in Russian are primarily distinguished by pronunciation and some grammatical and lexical variation. In RNC, they are represented in the dialectal subcorpus, and this data was not included in our study.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anna Wierzbicka, Kevin Windle, Cliff Goddard and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the chapter.
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Gladkova, A. (2020). When Value Words Cross Cultural Borders: English Tolerant Versus Russian Tolerantnyj. In: Sadow, L., Peeters, B., Mullan, K. (eds) Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_5
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