Summary
the language unite and resulting in the restructuring of certain areas of the language
!v!tem This point can be illustrated by the changes in the case system and
nrlositional government, resulting in a tendency for replacing non-prepositional
constructions with the prepositional ones. This tendency is part of the general process
of analytical features development alongside with the spread of some prepositional
constructions while some other synonymic constructions that have existed in the
Russian language for quite a long time are becoming archaic. Another example of
profound inner changes in the functioning and development of Modern Russian are
changes in the course of phonetic processes and in the prosodic characteristics of
both words and utterances.
Rather complicated and caused by various factors, linguistic, as well as
communicative and social, are semantic changes in the lexicon. They are indicative
of changes in the synonymic, antonymic and other types of paradigmatic relations
between words that enter lexical classes and form new lexical pairs and sets, which
is symptomatic of forming new relations between vocabulary units and, besides,
reflects the processes of reconsidering and reevaluation of certain communicatively
relevant lexical classes by the speakers.
It is worth mentioning one more type of «growth points», namely the shifts in the
society's attitude to language. The society, in particular its most educated and socially
active groups, have begun to look more closely at what is happening with the Russian
language and to give its evaluations of it. The evidence of this is not only a violent
reaction of press, electronic mass media, writers, politicians, and representatives of
other social groups to the suggestions of changes in orthography made by linguists,
but also various public discussions that take place on the radio, TV, in press, and in
the Internet, of the problems of modern Russian, its impoverishment, coarsening,
clogging with unnecessary loanwords, jargon, substandard phrases, etc.
Of special interest is the comparison between the active processes in the Russian
language on the territories of its traditional long-standing existence and the situation
of the Russian language in the Russian diaspora abroad and its changes in foreign
surrounding. The problems of the language of the mother country and. of the
emigration are of different nature. Thus, for the Russian language abroad it is relevant
whether it is going to be preserved by the middle and, especially, the young generation
of emigrants. The same is irrelevant for the Russian language of the mother country,
or relevant in a different way (the protection of the language against unnecessary
intensive borrowing, from the invasion of nonstandard language means language
policy directed at the support of the Russian language as the state language etc ).
The data obtained in the process of the research hint that the degree of Russian
language preservation by Russian emigrants depends on a number of cultural social
psychological and other factors, on how much attention is paid to the mother tongue'
in the process of communication within the family, on ambitions and val л
on