Italy through her eyes: foreign language inclusions and their functions in V. S. Tokareva’s memoir “Roman Holidays”

Archive of Scientific Articles

ISSUE:

Philology. Theory & Practice. 2025. Volume 18. Issue 11

COLLECTION:

Russian Language

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Abstract. The research aims to identify the thematic spheres of usage of Italian inclusions, encompassing both foreign-language insertions and actual borrowings, and the specifics of their functioning in an ego-text – V. S. Tokareva’s memoir “Roman Holidays”. Words and expressions from another language, acting as iconic signs in the text, immerse the Russian reader into a different cultural space and form in their mind an image of Italy, drawing researchers’ attention to the “Italian text” within the Russian literary tradition, a tradition that the writer continues. The scientific novelty of the work lies in its analysis of the system of foreign-language elements within the framework of functional-semantic types of speech – narration, reasoning (explanation and argumentation), and narration-reasoning, which are fragments of discourse with a unified format of exposition. This includes describing the distribution of foreign inclusions and identifying the features of their functioning in a contemporary women’s memoir, which exhibits characteristics of an ego-document and is distinguished by a specific organization of linguistic means. The analysis presented in the article demonstrates the spectrum of functions performed by borrowed linguistic elements in a personal narrative: nominative, exotic, contact-establishing, emotive, etc. Foreign-language inclusions in the memoir become a means of expressing authorial irony and an element of linguistic play, and also serve as a stimulus for the protagonist’s reflection, which correlates with the discursive formation of the genre to which the analyzed text belongs. Determining the position of foreign inclusions and their function in a first-person narrative leads to an understanding of the mechanisms by which a Russian-speaking reader forms an image of the described country, which may be unfamiliar to the addressee but is of interest to the reader. As a result of the study of foreign-language elements used in V. S. Tokareva’s story and their distribution in the text according to functional-semantic types of speech, the following thematic groups of foreign vocabulary were identified: human (profession, social role, forms of address reflecting communicative relationships, etc.), city, travel, and cuisine, which collectively shape the reader’s perception of an “alien” world, the one the narrator encounters.