Биг мак, или траектория одного англицизма в современной прессе

The article is devoted to the problem of using foreign words in modern Russian press. The topic has been proven actual by a great number of both Russian and foreign researches. Nowadays the mass media can be regarded as one of the most important ways of anglicisms penetration. The scientific novelty of the study is as follows: lexical borrowing is regarded not as a result but as an ongoing process of foreign words acceptance. The author focuses her attention on lexical items recoded from English but not yet accepted into the lexical system of the Russian language. Cross-language recoding is represented in the article as a complex process including several stages of assimilating foreign words. The article aims to study the initial stage of foreign words acceptance paying special attention to its graphic representation and grammatical characteristics. The article presents the results of analyzing all the contexts of using the lexeme “big” in Russian newspapers issued since the beginning of the XXIst century and gathered in the National corpus of Russian language. A complex quantitative and qualitative analysis of recoded words has been provided within the present research. General scientific and statistic methods have been used as well as some linguistic methods of research. As a result, specifi c features of graphic representation of analyzed lexical items have been revealed, grammatical categories and the most common words combinations have been described as well as some stylistic peculiarities of its use in the Russian press. The results of the research have demonstrated that the initial stage of foreign words penetration can be characterized by modifying an alphabet system, variants of writing and changes of some grammatical categories. The lexical meaning of recoded words is still unchangeable imitating a source language. The author also notices some stylistic peculiarities of using recoded lexical items in newspapers.