New and Traditional Emotion Terms in Russian: Semantics and Culture

Abstract

The Russian language of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century attracts the attention of scholars due to its changes, which are determined by the overall economic and social changes in the country. The most significant and characteristic transformations in the language are the following: the increase of the volume and the rate of words borrowed from other languages, the loss of certain words denoting Soviet realia and the loss of ideological flavor of certain words, innovations and massive deviations from the linguistic norms, and the "criminalization" of the lexicon. This article focuses on one of the above-mentioned phenomena of the contemporary Russian, that is, borrowings as a reflection of the influence of other cultures and languages on Russian. New words that enter Russian from other languages signify changes in the way of life, thinking and behaving. The most revealing in this sense are emotion and value terms because their meanings are reflective of cultural beliefs, assumptions and understandings. Therefore, the approach implemented in this article is that language, and its lexicon in particular, can be considered a gateway into a people's culture. Moreover, changes in a language are indicative of cultural changes.