Corpus Linguistics Tools for Loanwords and Borrowings Studies

The present article deals with studies and analyzes the lexical innovations of French origin in the Russian literary language on materials of fiction, opinion journalism, as well as etymological, defining, and foreign dictionaries under well-defined criteria of foreign word extraction. Various investigations dedicated to the study of language contacts offer variety of criteria describing the functioning of foreign vocabulary in the Russian lexical system as the result of interaction of various manifestation of language contacts. The article highlights the main principles and potentials of using methods of corpus analysis for studying language contacts from a historical perspective. This study analyzes the gallicisms of the military terminology that came to the Russian language at the end of the 18th and the 19th centuries and were recorded in numerous significant examples of Russian literature. Conducting the diachronic analysis of their functional development using the methods of corpus linguistics allows us to establish and demonstrate some common and particular processes of foreign language vocabulary: the development of the form and the content of foreign vocabulary, the periodization of their maximum and minimum distribution, and the correlation of language data with extralinguistic factors.