From the middle of the 1980's, a large number of borrowed words, especially from English, have been incorporated into Russian language. My thesis investigates selected aspects of such recent Anglicisms in Russian language in morphology, semantics and discourse functions. I examine the gender distribution among newly imported borrowed words and its correlation with declinability, and possible discourse-semantic motivations for borrowing; I suggest possible explanations for the directions in which the semantic network of new borrowed words develops, using the metaphor model by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Lakoff 1987 and 1994). All my data were collected from recent major Russian periodicals, magazines, websites, and the Russian National Corpus. In addition, I conducted a survey among native speakers in order to examine selected aspects of gender and declinability. I demonstrate the Petrine and the post-Petrine period and the linguistic innovations after the 1917 Revolution showing similarities between those eras and linguistic changes at present. I gave an overview of morphological changes in the Revolutionary times as well, since they affected the current state of Russian nominal system. The thesis also shows that the semantic properties assigned to a newly borrowed word correlate with the assumptions and experience of speakers of the recipient language, and argue that this notion of an underlying conceptual system is relevant in motivating grammatical as well as socio-linguistic functions of English borrowings. By doing so, my thesis essentially suggests that the metaphor theory may be expanded to areas of grammar and social interaction. (LLBA, Accession Number 200707896, (c) CSA [2007]. All rights reserved.)