Semantic and Linguocultural Features of Football Vocabulary in Russian and Portuguese

The article investigates the peculiarities of Portuguese and Russian football vocabulary. Not only is a comparative method used in our research, but also semantic, paradigmatic, componential, and linguocultural analyses are carried out. As a result of the study, we consider football terminology to be part of language and culture. Being English by origin, it permeates other languages, Russian and Portuguese in particular. Football terms formed the basis of the football vocabulary in the analyzed languages when football gained its popularity in Russia, Portugal, and Brazil at the turn of the 19 th – 20 th centuries. In both languages the tendency for derivative adaptation of international football terminology through native lexis, which function either parallel to international terms or completely replacing them, is carefully examined. Football terms are not real duplicates, as they have certain nuances in lexical meaning and stylistic coloring. Taking into account linguocultural reasons of the derivative adaptation of international football terminology, it is hard to ignore the fact that football vocabulary has gained the status of an important and necessary part of the national lexicon among speakers of these languages where the popularity of football is obvious. A high level of expressiveness in the football jargon of both the Russian and the Portuguese languages, along with its metaphorisation, is accounted for by the emotional perception of football both by players and spectators. The analysis of various expressive names in football jargon has revealed that the preference is given to metaphorisation and reduplication in both languages. It can be observed that in Russian expressive football names are made with the help of lexical and word-formation means. It is concluded that Russian and Portuguese football vocabulary, including official terminology and football jargon, is developing really dynamically.