Cognitive-semantic reconstruction of borrowings in the Russian language: a functional-stylistic perspective

Abstract

The article examines the cognitive-semantic reconstruction of borrowings in Russian depending on their functioning in scientific, journalistic, and literary styles. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that traditional descriptions of borrowed vocabulary usually focus on the source language, the time of borrowing, and the degree of formal adaptation, whereas stylistic and cognitive reorganization of meaning often remains underexplored. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the communicative tasks of a functional style direct the reinterpretation of a borrowed unit and which cognitive mechanisms support this process. The material includes dictionary descriptions as well as studies in functional stylistics, cognitive semantics, language contact, and the adaptation of foreign lexical items in contemporary Russian. As a result, the article proposes a three-part analytical model: «communicative need of the style – cognitive mechanism – path of semantic reconstruction». It is shown that in scientific discourse borrowings tend to move toward terminological stabilization and controlled metaphorization, in journalistic discourse toward evaluative expansion, metonymic compression, and rapid socialization of meaning, and in literary discourse toward image integration and cultural reaccentuation. The novelty of the study lies in describing borrowing adaptation not as a single linear process, but as a stylistically differentiated system of semantic transformations in which the same lexical unit may follow different trajectories of meaning adaptation across functional spheres.