Smith, May.; (1996) The influence of French on eighteenth-century literary Russian in the writings of D.I. Fonvizin. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which the French language influenced the Russian literary language in the eighteenth century and is based upon an examination of the prose writings of the playwright, translator and publicist, D. I. Fonvizin. The study is divided into two parts. The first part deals with loan-words introduced into Russian from French, and considers in particular the way in which features of the pronunciation of the words in French were either preserved or modified on their introduction into Russian. The phonetic system of the two languages are set out and the phonetic features specific to the eighteenth century are indicated. The original French words and their counterparts in Russian are then compared. This allows conclusions to be drawn on the manner in which French sounds could be represented in Russian loan-words at this time. The second part examines calques and classifies them into four groups. The first two groups, semantic and phraseological calques, are in greater number and therefore given precedence. The syntactic and especially the morphological calques are significantly rarer; these two groups are the third and the fourth in the classification.

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