Linguistic progmatics of English borrowings in Russian mass communication discourse

The paper focuses on linguistic and pragmatic peculiarities of English borrowings used in the discourse of mass communication in Russian. The analysis of Russian-language web content has enabled the author to identify the symbolic significance of shoe names borrowed from the English language. The system of values referred to a fashionable lifestyle was revealed and described; the thematic domains, such as sports, healthy lifestyle, active life position, and eco-activism are highlighted. The shoe names borrowed from English are regarded in the article in terms of translingual units and are defined as linguistic signs, which belong to another language, but the speakers, who are the agents of network communication, use them ad hoc to convey the ideas through switching the language code. Translingual units are found out to be universal symbols in the context of global mass culture. Having crossed the borders of the languages, they broadcast new values. Meanwhile, they spontaneously go through the main stages of linguistic adaptation and actively penetrate the network content of mass communication. The article presents the techniques of the borrowed shoe names translingual adaptation. The identified techniques include translingual derivation, partial grammatical categorization, conversion and blending, which consists in the occasional composition of the original, graphically unadapted English stem - a proper noun denoting a brand name of the shoe manufacturer, and a Russian suffixoid -ovsk- , which forms relative adjectives with the generalized meaning of sharing characteristics, prescribed to the object, indicated by the root morpheme. Phonetic assimilation of translingual shoe names presupposes following pronunciation rules of the Russian language, including the reduction of vowels in the first pre-stressed syllable; devoicing voiced consonants at the end of a word; palatalization; coexistence of diphthongized and monophthongized variants of vowel pronunciation, which indicates the incompleteness of phonetic adaptation.