The semantic evolution of the Latin loan word "sic" from 19th-century usage to modern Internet communication

The subject of the study is the semantic evolution of the Latin loan word "sic" (so) from the usage of the late XVIII – early XXI century. The object of the research is the process of migration of the borrowed lexeme from the scientific style to the journalistic one and then into the practice of online communication of anonymous forums and image boards. The authors consider in detail such aspects of the topic as the shades of meaning of the word sic when it first appeared in the Russian language (based on the materials of the National Corpus of the Russian Language), subsequent changes in meaning, dating back to the context of the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Idiot", and the introduction of the analyzed lexeme into the practice of anonymous dialogues on the Internet. Special attention is paid to the functions of the analyzed borrowing in modern Internet dialogues and its use as a marker of meta-irony and distancing the subject of speech from the quoted point of view. The research methods include a quantitative analysis conducted using corpus linguistics tools, as well as a method of semantic analysis of isolated contexts from texts of scientific, journalistic, artistic style, as well as anonymous dialogues on the Internet. The main conclusions of the study concern the functions of the Latin use of sic : the first contexts of its use date back to the second half of the 19th century, the latest contexts indicate the context of self-irony, meta-irony. A special contribution of the authors to the research of the topic is the identification, using the means of corpus linguistics, of the moment of the origin of the expressive semantics of the Latin word sic and its further development in the Russian language. The scientific novelty of the study lies in tracing the trajectory of the semantic change of this word throughout the history. The analyzed borrowing has not previously been considered in Russian science either from the point of view of its semantics or from the point of view of the pragmatics of its use in modern discourse, which determines the novelty of the research being undertaken.

borrowing, latin language, internet, internet communication, scientific style, evolution, latinism, image board, journalistic style, media