Runglish in Action: Anglicisms in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon

Abstract

This paper examines the functioning of some new Anglicisms in the bilingual mental lexicon which consists of Russian as L1 and English as L2, by means of the association experiment. English-based neologisms of today have a number of interesting features: they exist in abundance, they are used extensively and ubiquitously, many of these words are not subject to a single spelling standard. The (bilingual) mental lexicon is key to exploring the semantic structures used by individuals to form and express thoughts, as well as to study their lexical representations. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the free and the controlled association tests, the article concludes that the well-developed bilingual identity, on the one hand, contributes to putting L2 vocabulary knowledge into practice; on the other hand, it prevents L2 lexemes from becoming part of the bilingual’s L1. Thus, it is possible to assume that the higher the level of English the less likely it is that certain English words will turn into Anglicisms. Besides, the bilinguals' use of Anglicisms is characterized by a shift in the meaning of the L1 lexemes towards the corresponding English words.