“The theatre’s full, the boxes glitter…” linguistic and cultural description

The article examines French borrowings, nominating the audience hall in theatrical terminology. We investigate the semantic history of linguistic modules related to the temple of art, the ones that affect such issues as interference and assimilation of linguistic units in written and oral speech. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that the rapidly changing architecture of the spatial environment transforms the perception of personality in their awareness of spiritual values. A linguistic and cultural analysis was carried out in order to actualize the semiotic approach to architecture and reactivate the appeal to cultural heritage by studying the lexeme evolution in the sphere of art. In the study, we use the texts of the bilingual author and creator of the modern Russian literary language Alexander Pushkin, whose works contain the considered lexical units in the dynamics of the language system evolution at the semantic and phonetic levels. Our study also includes elements of comparative and contextual analyses (correlation of the analyzed phenomena in Pushkin’s context). The article presents a number of examples proving the historical relationship between the proto-language and the theatrical structure form, illustrating the phonographic and semantic changes of French units, and draws a parallel between the modern semantic complex and the archaic version of lexemes. Based on the results of the study, the article draws conclusions about the substitution of morphemic and non-morphemic segments in the process of contact between the French and Russian languages, presenting the most frequent variants of phonographic changes in the nomination of the auditorium. The results obtained are important for the revival of cultural values, the study of the lexeme interference in specific terminology and the activation of interest in both the work of A. Pushkin and theater building architecture.