The role of the individual in the phonographic assimilation of French vocabulary: based on lexicographical sources and texts by A. S. Pushkin

Abstract

The study aims to identify the phonographic variants used by A. S. Pushkin in the assimilation of French borrowings, in comparison with the conventional processes of foreign lexeme adaptation in the 18th and 19th centuries. The word forms of both the Gallicism and its prototype, selected from lexicographical sources and the texts of the bilingual author, are subjected to analysis. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, using the material of A. S. Pushkin’s works, the process of phonetic-graphic interference between the Russian and French languages is described and systematized. As a result of the study, the extent of French speech influence on the Russian literary norm is determined, alongside the changes in the usage rules of one structural-semantic unit under the impact of another in the context of the linguistic interaction between the two language systems. The specificities of the French alphabet, particularly the presence of characters absent in Russian, led to the emergence and spread of specific phonetic-graphic series during the period under study. At the same time, in the interaction of the two languages, the writer’s texts reflect individual characteristics of perceiving the phonetic-graphic material of another language through the functioning of variants that are not reproduced in the lexicographical sources of the period.