THE STYLISTIC FUNCTIONS OF THE LOANWORD LEXICON IN NAR-DOS'S SHORT STORY CYCLE “OUR NEIGHBORHOOD”

Abstract

This article examines the loanword lexicon in Nar-Dos's short story cycle Our Neighborhood through an integrated approach combining contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the stylistics of literary discourse. The aim of the article is not merely to classify loanwords according to their origin but to explore their behavior in the text by taking into account the pathways of direct or mediated borrowing, the degree of their phonological and morphological assimilation, their distribution between the narrator's discourse and the characters' speech, as well as their functional-semantic load․

During the research descriptive, contextual, stylistic, functional-semantic, and comparative methods are employed. The unit of analysis is not limited to individual loanwords but also includes the textual contexts in which they acquire additional social, temporal, spatial, or evaluative meanings. The analysis demonstrates that the older and more thoroughly assimilated Persian, Arabic, and Turkish strata function primarily as natural components of the vernacular lexicon, whereas the more strongly marked lexical items borrowed from Russian, through Russian, or from Georgian frequently serve as sociolinguistic indicators of urban life, administrative and economic relations, and the multilingual environment of Tiflis. The main conclusion is that loanwords perform nominative, characterizing, chronotopic, social-indexical, and expressive functions within the literary text.