American and British English - Polish - Russian semantic analysis of automotive LSP

Abstract

The article is devoted to investigating British English, American English, Polish and Russian automotive LSP. There are three main tasks to be accomplished: conducting semantic analysis, comparing British and American versions, identifying borrowings in Polish and Russian. The first one allowed to determine paradigmatic relations, designate thematic groups and systematize the microsystem. The second analysis revealed numerous discrepancies between British and American sets, including different or partially different lexemes nominating the same real objects, as well as examples of compounds with various spelling rules being applied to. Finally, there are twenty four direct borrowings from English into Polish and Russian (approximately seventeen percent of the analyzed vocabulary total), which confirms the leading role of British and American English as source languages for automotive LSP.