The Wendish Research Exchange

Szpila, Grzegorz: English Borrowings in the Contemporary Upper-Sorbian Press

mersiowsky - 7-2-2019 at 07:12 AM

Lětopis Abstract 2018 2: Szpila, Grzegorz: English Borrowings in the Contemporary Upper-Sorbian Press

The paper examines the presence of English borrowings in contemporary Upper-Sorbian newspapers and magazines. The article discusses the process of borrowing from English into Upper-Sorbian in the context of language contact between the three languages: Upper-Sorbian, German, and English. The author analyses the collected lexical material (600 items) from various perspectives: parts of speech, spelling, and morpho-syntactic features. The English borrowings in Upper-Sorbian are also scrutinized semantically: they are discussed in terms of lexical fields they form in Upper-Sorbian as well as in terms of semantic adaptations that occur in the process of borrowing. Additionally, the author discusses derivational processes that English loanwords may undergo in the Upper-Sorbian language. Last but not least, the author talks about the reasons for the occurrence of English lexical borrowings in the Upper-Sorbian press of recent years as well as in this Slavonic language in general.