Semantic Analysis of the French Word “Pistol†and its Origin in Russian Literary Language

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 authors discuss peculiarities of semantic adaptation of the Gallicisms in the context of convergent-divergent features of the French prototype’s semantics and correlative borrowing in the Russian language. On a material of works of Russian authors of 19 - early 20 century, dictionaries of foreign words of the Russian language, explanatory and etymological dictionaries of the French language and French written monuments of 17 - 18 centuries the complex component and semantic analysis of lexical structures of French words and Gallicisms has been realized to identify the most productive models of the reception and adaptation of the values of the foreign word in lexical system of the receiving language, as well as the description of the phenomena that occur in the process of language contact and directly or indirectly affect the choice of a particular model.