This article discusses the changes in Russian word formation under the
influence of English grammar, especially the compound formation rules. A
useful feature of the English language is that a noun can be used as an
adjective, providing information about another noun. Compounds are simply
elements strung together without any markers, characterized by attributive or
appositional relationships betweeen the head and the modifier. In English, the
head of a compound is the last word, and compound nouns that consist of more
than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a
time. It is also possible to have syntactic compounds, embedded constructions
and hyphenated compounds. Russian shows a great flexibility in phonetically
and morphologically adapting not only single words (loans and calques), but
also compound formation patterns borrowed from English, particularly the
modifier/head principle. Moreover, the process of borrowing may give rise to
phenomena such as semantic extension and semantic duplication. Finally,
examples will be given of how the influence of English is linked to the
sociolinguistic notion of prestige and “discourse attuning”.
