French internationalisms in Russian sports terminology

The aim of the study is to identify current trends in the development of interlingual contact, using sports terms – internationalisms as a case study. The article determines the role and place of French borrowings in Russian-language sports terminology. Special attention is paid to the mechanisms of semantic adaptation of foreign terms. The work is novel in that it is the first one to summarize and systematize French-language units of the Russian sports terminology system. The study has found that the influence of French on Russian sports terminology is due to extralinguistic factors, namely, historical preconditions and established traditions of naming specific sports realities. Words of French origin denote concepts of different sports: fencing, equestrian sports, gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, figure skating. Denotata are sports, actions, positions, participants, events, sports organizations, prizes, material objects. The main vector of reception of the meaning of a foreign word is the narrowing of its semantic structure. From the point of view of formal-structural characteristics, borrowed lexemes are single-word terms, on the basis of which terminological combinations, as well as abbreviations, can be formed.