Buzzwords as an example of interlingual lacunarity in various kinds of professional discourse (based on the English language material)

Abstract

The article is focused on the analysis of structural-semantic features of buzzwords and relating to them problem of interlingual lacunarity in two kinds of professional discourse – business and political-legal discourse. Buzzwords are understood as a special category of lexical units which emerge die to the need of nominating new culture-specific elements, tendencies and trends, as well as attaching novelty to existing in the language phenomena. The study relevance is stipulated by the common understanding that buzzwords represent the newest layer of modern English vocabulary reflecting the most recent changes currently happening in the English language under the influence of modern socio-political processes. The authors draw attention to a close relation between buzzwords and interlingual lacunarity as buzzwords do not have laconic variants of translation, thus demanding the use of various techniques of direct translation such as borrowing, calque and literal translation. Special emphasis is put on some word formation models, according to which many buzzwords are formed. Such word formation methods include affixation, abbreviation, blending and metaphoric transfer. Having considered the results of the research, the authors come to conclusion that different word formation models prevail in different kinds of discourse, as well as different direct translation techniques can be applied to translate them from English into Russian. For political-legal discourse more widespread word formation models include affixation, abbreviation and metaphoric transfer, whereas in business discourse, alongside with abbreviation, blending is also widely used. The most common translation technique is literal translation, sometimes together with other methods. For instance, while translating buzzwords belonging to political-legal sphere, in particular, those formed by affixation using the suffix -ism and the prefix post-, it is possible to provide borrowing as the translation of the new word. Nevertheless, further such borrowed lexical unit will demand additional explanation which is usually represented by the literal translation of its definition. Lack of equivalents of buzzwords in lexicographic sources in Russian proves the fact that they belong to the category of interlingual lexical gaps.

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“…Studies of semantic lexical gaps in business and legal discourse [21,22] showed that they may be viewed as a way of transmitting national and cultural specifics of the language; they include a number of idioms, phraseological units, proverbs and sayings [23] Besides, they reflect differences in values between the two linguocultures [24].…”