Diachronic Study of Paraphrases

Abstract

The analysis in the preceding chapter established divergent trends characterising the use of business-related loanwords in the patriotic opposition press on the one hand, and in the newspapers loyal to the Kremlin or supporting liberal parties on the other. The collocational patterns in the CPOP revealed the pejorative use of the loanwords, whereas in English and in the RPC the same loans were found to be predominantly used neutrally as semi-technical terms. Building on this evidence, this chapter will examine two interrelated research questions: How were these negative deontic meanings developed intertextually in the process of their negotiation in the newspaper texts? And how were the paraphrases of the loanwords, as vehicles of implicit and explicit intertextuality, employed in the construction of delegitimisation strategies? Here I adopt a qualitative and diachronic approach to the same large collection of chronologically ordered texts, which is expected to provide a window into the gradual discursive crafting of these new meanings. Such an approach also presents an opportunity to investigate the contrasting tendencies, which in this case are the instances where the loanwords were used in semi-technical contexts in the CPOP.