SEMANTIC DEFORMATION OF THE NOUN “ACTIVITY” AS A RESULT OF THE PROCESS OF BORROWING

Pogorelova I. V.

The article explores the functioning of the English borrowing ‘activity’ in contemporary Russian. The study of contextual distribution made it possible to highlight the semantic intersections of the loan word under consideration with its Russian equivalents as well as the incomplete correspondence of the latter to the semantic volume of the lexical unit ‘activity’. The analysis of the factual material revealed full synonyms for the borrowing ‘activity’ in Russian: ‘event’, ‘occupation’, ‘entertainment / game’ and ‘sport’. The study demonstrated that in a number of cases the loan word ‘activity’ allows the text producer to implement the principle of linguistic economy as it makes the introduction of separate categories / descriptions for concepts that are difficult to categorise unnecessary

Keywords:semantics, borrowing, English loans, semantic volume, semantic gap