Linguistic Integration of the Newest Anglicisms into the Russian Language

This paper represents a study of usage of the newest English loan words in modern Russian. The data for this research were extracted from the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. This corpus provides examples of usage of over thirteen thousand tokens with -ing suffix. New words with -ing suffix are analyzed for degree of linguistic integration into Russian. We examine the processes that loan words undergo while getting integrated into the Russian language on every linguistic level, as well as dispersion of the new loans across semantic fields. Analysis of the Russian National Corpus data lets us distinguish between those loan words that occur only once, or a couple of times (occasional loans), and those used by many speakers (widespread loans). This analysis makes it possible to draw a conclusion about integration of the loan words and their phonological, grammatical, and derivational characteristics.


Introduction
This paper deals with the notion of the most recent borrowings from English into Russian, namely with one group of neologisms -the words with the -ing suffix.Several issues will turn out to be crucial.Firstly, there is the issue of semantic classification and stylistic features of the new loan words.Secondly, there is a need to describe phonological and orthographic problems that the neologisms pose for a Russian speaker.Thirdly, the recent borrowings display specific morphological and syntactic features that need to be discussed.Finally, the material that we analyze will let us draw a conclusion about different stages of assimilation to the system of the Russian language that loan words undergo.
The structure of this paper is as follows: In section 1, we will introduce the notion of a borrowing and a loan word; we will discuss the main linguistic and extralinguistic reasons for borrowing English words into Russian.Section 2 will briefly mention the history of the -ing borrowings from the 18th century till present time.In section 3, we will examine semantic and stylistic classification of the new words, as well as the way the words of different semantic groups function in the discourse.Section 4 focuses on the issues of phonological and orthographic assimilation of the neologisms.In section 5, we will describe some morphological and syntactic properties of the -ing borrowings.In section 6, we will offer some conclusions and paths for further research.

The notion of borrowing
It is customary to use the terms recipient language for the language that acquires a word, and donor language for the language that is the source of the loan word.A loanword 'can be defined as a word that is transferred from a donor language to a recipient language' (Haspelmath 2009, 4).
Linguists distinguish two groups of reasons for acquiring new words.The first group includes purely linguistic factors (Krysin 1968, 12), (Breyter 1997, 132-135): 1.The first and the most important reason for borrowing a new word is to denote a new concept.Breyter claims that about 15% of the latest Anglicisms were borrowed simultaneously with borrowing a new concept (Breyter 1997, 132).
2. A loan word can be used when there is no word specific enough to denote a concept in the receiving language.Examples of this kind can be found if we look at the names of literary and cinematic genres that were borrowed into the Russian language: [fentez'i] ('fantasy'), [horar] ('a horror movie or a book') etc.
3. A loan word can be used if it is shorter than the native term, if it is easier to pronounce it, or if its etymology is more transparent.For example, the recent borrowing [praisl'ist] ('price list') has displaced the older borrowing from German [pr'eiskurant], because the etymology of the Anglicism is a lot more transparent for a Russian speaker.
4. A loan word can be acquired to specify different meanings of a native polysemantic word.For instance, the English word image, borrowed into Russian, has specified the Russian word obraz, which was highly polysemantic.Now, image has adopted some of the functions of the native term.In the modern discourse there are contexts that allow using only image, while other contexts require the usage of obraz.
5. A loan word can have a special emphatic function, referring to foreign contexts.6.A loan word can have additional positive or negative connotations, which the native equivalent would lack.On the other hand, a loan word can help to avoid some unwanted negative or positive connotations, which the native term would have.For example, the English word killer, which was borrowed into Russian in the 90s, does not imply a strong negative connotation that the Russian equivalent has.Killer in Russian means someone whose job is to kill for money, while the Russian word ubijca has very strong negative and judgmental connotations.
The second group of reasons for borrowing a foreign word includes the extralinguistic factors: 1. Reinforcement of relationships between two societies; 2. Prestige and fashion; 3. Shift in the mentality of a people; 4. Another important social reason for intensified borrowing from English is the fact that more people nowadays tend to learn English, to use it as their working language or to go abroad, where they have to speak English.Diakov claims that this factor makes it possible for a Russian speaker to switch their code when they talk about foreign countries or concepts (Diakov 2001, 156).

Data for the research
The data for our research are taken from the Russian National Corpus.The Russian National Corpus (RNC) incorporates over 500 million words.The corpus represents the Russian language 'in all the variety of genres, styles, territorial and social variants of usage, etc' (http://ruscorpora.ru/en/corpora-intro.html).The RNC consists of 10 subcorpora: the main corpus, dialectical corpus, poetical corpus, corpus of modern newspapers, parallel corpus, educational corpus, oral corpus, accentological corpus, corpus of multimedia, syntactic corpus.For the purpose of our research we were using the main corpus.The main corpus includes texts that represent standard Russian.It consists of 3 parts: modern written texts (from the 1950s to the present day), a subcorpus of real-life Russian speech (recordings of oral speech from the same period), and early texts (from the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 20th centuries) (Apresyan 2005, 193).By default, the search is carried out in all the three sub-groups, but in our research we have customized the search parameters to browse only through the first two parts of this corpus.We then have created a subcorpus that includes only texts for the period of 1980-2012, so it is the time of Ottepelj, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet period.The subcorpus incorporates 88 675 118 words.Usage of corpus not only lets us observe the massive data, but also allows comparison of frequency for different borrowings, comparison of later and earlier contexts of usage of a word.

Methods
The goal of this work determines the way research was carried out.The main goal of this paper is not to try to describe or to list the words with the -ing suffix, but rather to describe the main processes that one group of borrowings is undergoing on every linguistic level while getting integrated into the system of the Russian language.The subcorpus that we created includes 7,200 documents with the -ing borrowings, and about 4,200 of them contain the recent -ing borrowings that are common nouns.For some parts of the current research it was important to search through all 4,200 documents (for example, to define the main semantic groups of the -ing borrowings); for other parts of the research it was more important to analyze a much smaller amount of examples.For instance, for the analysis of syntactic functions of the -ing borrowings, it seemed sufficient to find examples of those borrowings performing the same syntactic functions as the native Russian nouns, rather than trying to describe their syntactic roles in every document out of 4,200.All the examples used in this paper were taken from the subcorpus created; they were translated and transliterated or given a broad transcription, if that was needed.

Borrowings with the -ing suffix in the 18th-20th centuries
The -ing borrowings constitute one of the largest groups of the latest loan words in the Russian language.According to the data of Russian National Corpus, the first -ing borrowings came into Russian in the 18th century.
At the end of the 18th century a massive wave of loan words was assimilated by the Russian language.The contexts of usage show that most of the -ing borrowings in this massive were used as technical terms in construction, shipbuilding, military organization and sciences: (1) By the evening, the wind became milder, and at 6 am we began to take off the anchor (a specific type of anchor -[f'irtoing]).К ночи он по обыкновению стих, и мы в 6 часов поутру стали сниматься с фертоинга... (Ф.П. Литке.Дневник, веденный во время кругосветного плавания на шлюпе «Камчатка» (Кронштадт) (1817)) Occasional borrowings of this derivational group came into the Russian language in the 19th century with the fashion for British culture: [smok'ing] (smoking jacket), Dramatical social changes of the beginning of the 20th century brought new loan words into Russia: [m'it'ing] (rally, political meeting), [r'ejt'ing] (rating).From an historical point of view, it is noteworthy, that some of those borrowings became habitual, stylistically neutral part of Russian lexicon (both examples above).These words were assimilated by the system and became derivative stems for other words in the Russian language: (2) [m'it'ing] -[m'it'ingavat] ('a rally' -'to arrange a rally') This word turned out to be extremely productive in Russian.Not only can it be a derivative stem for verbs and adjectives, but it can also be the base for compounds: (3) The secretary of the Central Committee ordered to arrange an urgent radio rally in Hebrew… «Секретарь ЦК дает мне указание -срочно созвать радиомитинг на еврейском языке... (Александр Борщаговский.Несыгранный «Гамлет» (1994)) At the same time, the corpus provides us with examples of occasional borrowings that did not turn out to be productive and did not become part of the system of the Russian language: (4) ...our feet are sliding, our stomachs are shaking.No one has any bounds.It's not life, it's a skating ring....ноги скользят, животы трясутся.И никто ни к чему не привязан.Этоскетингринг, а не жизнь… (В.В. Розанов. Уединенное (1900-1911)) The corpus shows that the neologism [sk'ejt'ing] ('skating') was "occasional" for that time (there is only one example), but it will be 'reborrowed' in the late 20th century to denote a new type of sport activity.

The -ing borrowings in general during the period of 1980-2012
The collapse of the Soviet Union caused an increase of Western influence.Large amounts of new concepts came into the everyday life of Russian people.L. P. Krysin argues that 'the majority of Russian people started to recognize our country as a part of civilized world.We began to follow the Western culture in sports, trade, fashion, music' (Krysin 1968, 7).Such a drastic sociological change has influenced the Russian language: a huge wave of loan words was acquired by the Russian speakers during the last twenty years.A vast majority of these new words came from English, and it is no surprise for English is becoming the language of international communication and achieving worldwide prestige.Due to fashion for everything Western and American in Russian culture, English words began to displace the native terms.Lately, English [interv'ju] (interview), [loft] (loft), [bojfrend] (boyfriend), [pr'iz'intacija] (presentation) and many others have almost driven the Russian equivalents out of use.The English language has become so popular and prestigious in Russia in the late 20th century, that Anglicisms have started to replace the earlier loan words that were borrowed from other languages.For example, the recent borrowing [glamur] (glamour) replaced the earlier word [gl'an'its], borrowed from German [glanz]; new borrowing [d'isplej] (display) replaced the older French loan word [ekran].
During the last 20-30 years the Russian language has been actively borrowing not only certain words, but also certain patterns, word structures, and certain affixes.
One of the most productive English suffixes in modern Russian is the suffix -ing.Krongauz notes that "what is funny is not the suffix itself, not the fact that we have borrowed it, but how fashionable it seems to the speakers" (Krongauz 2008, 160).Indeed, the -ing model seems to be one of the most productive derivational patterns across the most recent borrowings in Russian. Figure 1   As the number of loan words with this suffix was increasing, it was becoming more productive and, as a consequence, more independent derivationally.In 1996, Sh.Seshan claimed that a foreign word with the -ing suffix gets acquired as a whole unit and cannot be segmented into morphemes in the Russian language (Seshan 1996, 48).This view suggested that there was no such thing as a productive derivational morpheme -ing in Russian.In 2001, A. Diakov argued against this point of view, giving examples of occasional neologisms with native Russian stems and the -ing suffix.He argued that this morpheme can be added both to borrowed and native stems and it forms nouns with a general meaning of a processual event or action: "…For example, пластмассовые блюд-инги (plastic dish-ing), сардел-инги (sausage-ing) (examples are taken from the poem by A. Levin "In the mirror of press")" (Diakov 2001, 73).

Semantics
Scholar studies of loan words offer multiple semantic classifications for new words in the Russian language.O. Egorova and D. Nikitin suggest that all new borrowings can be categorized in the following groups: "...concepts of food; home and house holding; clothes; arts; communication; science; transport; society; economics and finance; politics; professions; sport" (Egorova, Nikitin 2011, 140-141).
Analysis of the -ing borrowings in the Russian National Corpus lets us define the following main semantic categories among the loan words of this derivational type.
Some words can acquire new, additional meanings in the process of their assimilation in the Russian language.An example of such semantic development is the word doping.It was borrowed into the Russian language with its main meaning: the use of a substance (as an anabolic steroid or erythropoietin) or technique (as blood doping) to illegally improve athletic performance (Merriam-Webster dictionary).According to the data of the Russian National Corpus, today this word undergoes the process of semantic broadening and acquires the second meaning: some means and ways to excite someone, to give someone energy, to cheer someone up.
(6) Going to new boutique shops is a real doping for most women. Пройтись

Politics, economics, finance, and business
The Russian language has borrowed a great amount of words related to political and economic systems.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these systems underwent major changes.New political and economic paradigms required new concepts and new words to denote those concepts.E. V. Rosen claims that there are two trends related to borrowing new lexical terms into this semantic class: 1) desire to express concepts, facts, and ideas as precisely and as fully as possible; and 2) shift from strict terminology towards artistic, creative, expressive denominations (Rosen 1991, 99).
A lot of words in this category are narrow terms; they are used only by professionals in a specific field: [anderajt'ing] ('underwriting'), [autsors'ing] ('outsourcing'), [kl'ir'ing] ('clearing'), [franchajz'ing] ('franchising') etc.A small group of words in this semantic category is being fully acquired by the Russian language.We can make such a conclusion, because now there are words derived from those borrowed terms: Another interesting process in this category can be illustrated with the word [bank'ing] ('banking').The high frequency and productivity of suffix -ing made it possible for this word to substitute the paraphrastic term for the same concept, which was in use in the Russian language: [bankavskaji apsluzhivanii] (lit.: 'bank services').

Technology and communication
Egorova and Nikitin claim that Anglicisms related to modern technology and new ways of communication constitute about 20% of the most recent borrowings (Egorova, Nikitin 2011, 139).This semantic group incorporates lexemes related to the modern Internet and computational technologies, mobile communication, television.These borrowings are 'numerous, frequent and productive' in the Russian language (Egorova, Nikitin 2011, 140).
This group, obviously, cannot be homogeneous frequency-wise.Most of the borrowings in this semantic class are only used by specialists of the field; we would describe them as professional terms, for they are used by professionals who work with computers.
(10) Unix Operating System is the most popular in network computing...The frequency of the 'more integrated' and the 'less integrated' words of this category in the corpus prove our observation.We were able to find 28 tokens for the lemma [host'ing] ('hosting'), 31 tokens for the lemma [roum'ing] ('roaming'), and only 6 tokens for [komp'jut'ing], and only 3 tokens for [l'ist'ing].

Fashion and beauty
The Russian beauty industry is a quickly developing field.It is no surprise that the semantic group of borrowings that refer to the new types of beautifying tools, procedures and techniques is very large and productive.Most of the new procedures and concepts were also borrowed 'from the West': [p'il'ing] ('peeling' -a body treatment technique), [l'ift'ing] ('facelift' -a type of cosmetic surgery procedure); [f'eisb'ild'ing] ('face building' -another cosmetic procedure).Most of these borrowings take active part in derivational processes and easily acquire adjectival and verbal suffixes.
(13) Modern trends of the beauty industry require a beauty salon to offer multiple medical and relaxing procedures, including peeling, anti-aging programs, facial correction and cosmetic surgeries (body and facelift etc.).Современные тенденции рынка красоты требуют наличия в салоне большого числа медицинских и релаксационных процедур, включая пиллинг, (...) подтяжку тканей, лифтинг бюста и т. д. (Анастасия Костюченкова.Почем красивый бизнес?( 2004) // «Бизнес-журнал», 2004.03.16) Terms for youth subcultural concepts constitute an interesting subgroup of this semantic class.Most of these terms denote some kind of identity markers that young people would need to have to become a part of a specific social group.In this group we can find words like [brend'ing] ('branding' -process in which a mark is burned into the skin of a person, with the intention that the resulting scar makes it permanent); [kat'ing] ('cutting' -process in which a mark is cut onto the skin); [p'irs'ing] ('piercing'), and others.It is interesting, that the word 'piercing' underwent the process of semantic narrowing when it was borrowed into Russian.In English, piercing is defined as 'a hole made through a part of human's body for putting jewelry there, or the process of making these holes'' (Longman Dictionary).In Russian, interestingly this word cannot refer the ear piercing, although it is widely used to refer to any other kind of piercing ( 14). ( 14) Why don't you put a scarf on your head and make tattoos and piercing all over your body?Почему не бандана, татуировки и пирсинг по всему телу?(Алексей Пугачев.Мое отношение к персонажу РМ (2000) // «Рекламный мир», 2000.03.30) The explanation for this case of semantic narrowing of the original meaning of the word piercing is of cultural and historical kind.There exists a Russian word for denoting ear piercing since that kind of body decoration has been common in Russia for centuries.The fashion for putting jewelry in other part of one's body came to Russia in the 20 th century and required a new term which was then borrowed from English.

Phonological assimilation and spelling
New words in a language require phonological and orthographic standardization or nativization.A lot of scholars consider phonological assimilation to be the first stage of borrowings acquisition (Aristova 1997, Breyter 1997, Timofeeva 1991).Diakov argues that at this stage of acquisition speakers use phonetics of the donor language, then 'English pronunciation starts following the rules of Russian phonology' (Diakov 2001, 24).When the Russian language lacks a specific sound used in English, it gets replaced with an articulatorily similar phoneme.Graphic and phonological representation of borrowed neologisms can be carried out in two different ways in the Russian language.Some of the Anglicisms get transliterated, while the others get transcribed.V. Aristova claims that 80% of loan words in Russian get transliterated, and only 20% appear in their transcribed form (Aristova 1978, 44).Sometimes both forms, transcribed and transliterated, can be present in the language system at the same time, which causes spelling variation.As an example of such variation we looked at the word [resl'ing] ('wrestling') that can be spelled either with the silent t in the stem, or without it, depending on whether the word is transliterated or transcribed: рестлинг -реслинг.The RNC provides us with 94 examples of using the transliterated form with the silent t, and with 49 examples of the same word being used without the silent consonant.This data support Aristova's findings mentioned above: the transliterated form of this -ing borrowing appears to be twice as frequent as the transcribed form.
The group of the -ing borrowings display one more type of spelling variations.Geminated consonants, which in English are historically caused by the rules of English phonology, present a challenge for Russian speakers2 : (17) a. Shop -shopping b.Jog -jogging c.Blog -blogging d.Control -controlling, and many others.
In the Russian language these words introduce alternations which are not typical for the Russian system.Russian speakers now have to deal with pairs of cognates, one member of which has a single consonant in the stem (e.g.[blog]), while the other one has geminated consonants (e.g.[blogging]).This kind of alternations has never existed in the Russian language before.The variations in spelling of new -ing borrowings let us assume that these words are not fully acquired by the language system yet.The RNC provides us with the following data:  1 shows that variants with geminated consonants are in general more frequent.These words have to be distinguished from another group of -ing borrowings with geminated consonants.The words in this group originally have geminated consonants as a part of their stem.Geminated consonants are not conditioned by the phonological environment here:

Gloss
(18) a. Press -pressing b.Toll -tolling c.Dress -dressing These words do not display any variations in spelling when they are borrowed into Russian; they are consistently spelled with geminated consonants.Stress in the new words poses another problem for a Russian speaker.Most of -ing borrowings keep the original stress when they are borrowed into Russian.For example, marketing in English has the first syllable stressed.The same stress pattern is observed in Russian.At the same time, some modern dictionaries display the variation: stress in this word moves to the second syllable, which is more natural for Russian stress system.Some of the new borrowings display stress patterns that are unnatural for a Russian speaker.Those words undergo stress shifting as a part of phonological assimilation.For instance, the word merchandising has a stress on the first syllable in English, while for a Russian word it is unnatural to have three post-stressed syllables, so stress shifts: [m'irčindajz'ing].These variations are documented by the accentological subcorpus of the RNC and by the dictionaries (Dictionary of Russian Orthoepy; Dictionary of Foreign Words).

Morphological integration of the -ing borrowings
Every loan word has to undergo the process of grammatical assimilation in the recipient language.This means that a loan word is supposed to function according to the grammatical rules of the language that borrows it.Words borrowed into Russian must first be assigned to a grammatical category.All of the -ing borrowings function as nouns in the Russian language.Usually, the loan noun gets included in one of inflectional paradigms of the recipient language.The differences between the contacting languages lead to reinterpretation of grammatical gender and number of the loan words in the recipient language.Although there is no category of grammatical gender in modern English, all Anglicisms in Russian get categorized to one of three gender classes: neutral, masculine, feminine.In terms of gender, the -ing borrowings do not pose any problems for a Russian speaker.All of them get easily assimilated to the category of masculine gender, for they all end with a consonant.The majority of Russian nouns of masculine gender end with a consonant (or have so-called zero inflection) in Nominative Case.
It does not seem to be a problem for a Russian speaker to use an -ing borrowing with a plural referent.All of the -ing borrowings, except for those that have semantic restrictions for plural, get regular masculine plural inflection.
Integrated -ing borrowings can be used in any of six Russian cases, following the rules of declension for masculine nouns with the zero inflection in Nominative Case: Depending on the degree of productivity, morphological assimilation can be followed by derivational integration.For example, the word шоппинг [shoping] -shopping acquires adjectival and verbal suffixes.It is of interest that the -ing suffix clearly gets perceived as a productive derivational morpheme in Russian:

Case
(20) To succeed in 'second-handing' one needs to have good imagination, be patient and strong.
Необходимые условия успешного секондхэндинга -развитое воображение, терпение, умение переносить невзгоды.(Василий Корецкий, Екатерина Гончаренко.Люди со вторыми руками (1997) // «Столица», 1997.04.01) In the example ( 21) we can see that the -ing suffix gets attached to the loan word 'second hand' which is normally used in Russian as an adjective.The -ing suffix in this case is employed to turn the adjective into a noun.The opposite derivational process can be observed in the example of the word хэппи энд [hep'i end] -happy ending, where the suffix gets deleted.

Syntactic integration of the -ing borrowings
The -ing forms in English can be used in various ways, as nouns, adjectives, and to form progressive aspect verb forms.In English 'the status of -ing constructions can range from very nominal in character to very verbal' (Berk 1999, 250).As we stated above, all the borrowings of this derivational type were assigned to the grammatical category of nouns in the Russian language.Integrated -ing borrowings in Russian, therefore, can perform any syntactic role that a Russian noun can perform:  The fact that the -ing borrowings were regularly assigned to the noun class in the Russian language causes important differences in usage of the -ing forms between the recipient and the donor languages.
It has been noticed, that 'English words that function as modifiers and get the role of adjectives in the donor language, function as head-nouns in the recipient language' (Vorobjeva 2009, 5).This observation can be illustrated with the example of functioning of the word [park'ing] (parking lot) in Russian.Parking functions as a modifier in English: parking lot, parking spot, parking space etc.In Russian, this word has acquired the meaning 'parking lot' and got integrated in the grammatical category of nouns.This means that now [park'ing] can be used with all types of Russian modifiers and gets included in regular number and case paradigms: [padz'emnyi park'ing] -'underground parking-lot', [moi park'ing] -'my parking-lot' etc3 .
On the other hand, according to the corpus data, some of the most frequent -ing borrowings can become a part of endocentric compounds.In this case, the -ing nouns are used in adjectival sense without acquiring adjectival morphology: [shop'ing-mol] ('shopping mall'), [shop'ing-tsentr] ('shopping centre'), [shop'ing-man'iya] ('shopping mania').We assume that this derivational model, unusual for Russian grammar, becomes more productive by analogy with the way the loan words are used in the donor language.At the same time, interestingly, we notice the Russian language finds an alternative way to express the same notions with more regular and natural means of its own system.For instance, for the word 'peeling cream' in the RNC we find both [p'il'ing-kr'em] and [p'il'ingavyi kr'em], the first being an English-like compound and the second being [p'il'ing] plus productive Russian adjectival suffix.

Conclusion
In the current paper we examined the integration or assimilation of the most recent Anglicisms in the Russian language, both in terms of linguistic (phonological, morphological, syntactic) categories, and in terms of their historical development, their level of usage, and their dispersion across semantic fields.The main goal of this paper was to describe the main processes that one group of borrowing is undergoing on every linguistic level.
Between the time when an English word first appears in Russian discourse and the time (if ever) it is fully-assimilated, many changes in form and usage can occur.'There is no natural way of identifying a discrete point within this interval before which the word is not an integrated loan, and after which it suddenly becomes one' (Miller, 1988, 50). Analysis of the Russian National Corpus data lets us distinguish between those loan words that occur only once, or a couple times (occasional loans), and those used by many speakers (widespread loans).Current research, with no doubt, shows that borrowing is a process over time rather than a sudden transition.
Semantically, the -ing borrowings disperse across multiple categories.The analysis of corpus data and scholar accounts made it possible for us to distinguish several main semantic classes: 1) sports, 2) politics, economics, finance and business, 3) technology and communication, and 4) fashion and beauty.The analysis of these four groups of borrowings showed that they do not always function in the same way in the discourse.Some of them seem to be better integrated into the Russian language than others.
Examining phonological and orthographic characteristics of the new words, we noticed multiple reasons for spelling variations.Although written data do not provide too many opportunities for a phonological research, we were able to notice some accentual variations as well.
The borrowed -ing forms display specific features in the distribution of grammatical categories.All of those borrowings were assigned to the category of nouns, although they can be attested in multiple categories in the donor language.In the question of gender assignment, number and case formation new loan words follow Russian patterns from an early stage of assimilation.
On the syntactic level, the -ing borrowings get inserted in the same syntactic slots that are appropriate for native Russian nouns.Some of the most frequent borrowings can also perform adverbial functions in compounds.
displays dynamics of acquiring the -ing words during the period of 1980-2010.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Distribution of the -ing borrowings in 1980-2010 Figure 1 illustrates increasing 'popularity' of borrowings with -ing suffix.It shows the amount of -ing tokens for a million words.The RNC provides us with 21,273 tokens of words with -ing suffix for the period of 1980-2010.During this time, the morpheme -ing became more independent in the Russian language.As the number of loan words with this suffix was increasing, it was becoming more productive and, as a consequence, more independent derivationally.In 1996, Sh.Seshan claimed that a foreign word with the -ing suffix gets acquired as a whole unit and cannot be segmented into morphemes in the Russian language(Seshan 1996, 48).This view suggested that there was no such thing as a productive derivational morpheme -ing in Russian.In 2001, A. Diakov argued against this point of view, giving examples of occasional neologisms with native Russian stems and the -ing suffix.He argued that this morpheme can be added both to borrowed and native stems and it forms nouns with a general meaning of a processual event or action: "…For example, пластмассовые блюд-инги (plastic dish-ing), сардел-инги (sausage-ing) (examples are taken from the poem by A. Levin "In the mirror of press")"(Diakov 2001, 73).

Table 1 :
The -ing borrowings with geminated consonants Table

Table 2 :
Comparison between declension of a native Russian masculine noun and an -ing borrowing