The semantic range of Anglicisms in Czech

James Wilson, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds

While loanwords in various Slavonic languages have received considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, little work has been carried out into their semantic range. This project builds on research into sociolinguistic variation in loanword pronunciation in Czech, during which it became apparent that several loanwords have a different semantic range than the donor form. I shall work mostly with words borrowed from (or via) English (i.e., Anglicisms) and my focus will be on (1) loanwords with a narrower semantic range than that of the donor form; (2) loanwords with a broader semantic range that that of the donor form; (3) loanwords whose meaning differs from that of the donor form. An example of (1) in Czech is the word drink, which is typically used to mean an alcoholic drink but not a hot drink like tea of coffee. The words green and wok are examples of (2): green, as a golf-related term, means either the "(putting) green" of a golf course (as in English) or is an informal term for an entire "golf course" (unlike in English); wok can mean both a "pan" and also a "stir-fry" meal. Type (3) loans are less common, but an example is pudink (via Eng. “pudding”), which is a sweet custard-like dessert. I shall use large and contemporary Web-crawled corpora (e.g. csTenTen23, a Czech language corpus containing approx. 4.5 billion words) to explore how loanwords are used in context and determine their semantic range. First, I shall look at loanwords in Czech before extending the work to include loanwords in Russian.