The theory of borrowing in the linguistic literature

Abstract

The article examines main aspects of the theory of borrowing, stressing that enrichment of any language is connected to the process of the borrowing of foreign words. We conducted a thorough analysis of necessity or unreasonableness of borrowing process. In the research, we included a notion “purism” whose main objective is to achieve absolute purity of the Ukrainian language by replacing borrowings with Ukrainian ones. It is emphasized that foreign words penetrate to the several spheres of society and word-borrowing of one industry often “is moving” to another one. The article argues that borrowing is an active process and language-recipient, borrowing some words, rebuilds them and submits to its own linguistic laws. According to the article, a borrowed word comes in the morphological system of language-recipient and receives appropriate grammatical category. We give an overview of developed interpretations of the concept “borrowing”. It is emphasized that borrowing can originate from the language source in both spoken and written ways. The article concentrates on Anglicisms as a form of borrowing, which shows the specific stage of human development, addressing specific marker of globalization. According to the formal and functional characteristics of the borrowings adjustment features to the language–recipient, the process of borrowing is accompanied by assimilation on morphological, phonetic, derivational and lexical-semantic linguistic levels. Usually, subordination of foreign words to the laws of the language recipient is a time-consuming process that involves initial, advanced and final stages of adaptation.