The grammatical ambiguity (multiple sets of grammatical features for one word form or coinciding surface forms of different words) can be of different types. We distinguish six classes of grammatical ambiguity: unambiguous, ambiguous by grammatical features, by part of speech, by lemma, by lemma and part of speech, and out-of-vocabulary words. These classes are found in all languages, but word distribution may vary significantly. We calculated and analysed the statistics of these six ambiguity classes for a number of European languages. We found that the distribution of ambiguous words among these classes depends primarily on basic linguistic features of a language determining its typology class. Although it is influenced by text style and the considered vocabulary, the distinctive shape of the distribution is preserved under different conditions and differs significantly from distributions for other languages. The fact that the shape is primarily defined by linguistic properties is corroborated by the fact that closely related languages demonstrated in our research similar properties as far as their ambiguous words are concerned. We established that Slavic languages feature a low rate of part-of-speech ambiguous words and a high rate of words which are ambiguous by grammatical features. The former is also true for French and Italian, while the latter holds for German and Swedish, whereas the combination of these traits is characteristic of Slavic languages alone. The experiments showed that reduction of the grammatical feature set does not change the shape of distribution and therefore does not reflect similarity among languages. On the other hand, we found that the top 1000 most frequent words in all the languages considered have different distribution in ambiguity classes unlike in the rest of the words. At the same time, for the majority of considered languages, less frequent words are less unambiguous by part of speech. In Romance and Germanic languages, the ambiguity is reduced for less frequent words. We also investigated the differences in statistics for texts of different genres in the Russian language. We found out that fiction texts are more ambiguous by part of speech than newswire, which are in turn more ambiguous by grammatical features. Our results suggest that the quality of multilingual morphological taggers should be measured relying only on ambiguous words as opposed to all words of the processed text. Such an approach can help get a more objective linguistic picture and enhance the performance of linguistic tools.

The article deals with the method of automatic detection of authors’ gender identity on the material of fiction prose of 1980-2000. During this period, there is a special construct, called “women’s prose”, which is characterized by a special genre and stylistic originality. We set ourselves the task to find out whether the concept of “women’s prose” refers only to the non-text reality or is clearly reflected at the level of language. We have collected corpus of texts 1980-2000 and conducted that identified the most effective machine learning algorithms for the classification of male and female prose. This research focuses on methods for automatically determining the gender identity of authors on the material of prose from 1960 to 2000. The purpose of this work is to identify optimal methods for automatically determining the gender identity of the authors. The objectives of this study include highlighting the grammatical and stylistic features of prose from 1960 to 2000 and, in particular, women's prose and texts of 18^th - 19^th centuries; tracing the changes in the distribution of usage different parts of speech and punctuation for a specified period and conducting an experiment to identify the most effective algorithm for the classification of literary texts by using machine learning. The analysis revealed that women and men often use in their texts the following parts of speech: nouns, verbs, prepositions, pronominal nouns, conjunctions, and adjectives that reflects the specific artistic style. In addition, analysis was made of the use of the most commonly used punctuation marks from the given list: question mark, exclamation point, comma, colon, semicolon, period, comma. It has been observed that women are more actively using the means of punctuation as a means of expression in modern literature: the share of the use of exclamation, question marks and commas the writers is much higher than the value obtained through the analysis of men’s texts. The work also contains an analysis of the distribution of parts of speech and punctuation of literary texts of men and women of 18^th - 19^th centuries. We performed experiment to identify the most effective algorithm for determining the gender identity of the author. It was found that the most effective classifiers of literature are the implementation of algorithms as BayesNet and SMO.

This article is devoted to the study of the linguo-culture of Russian Germans. The urgency and relevance of the topic motivated by modern realia and language problems at the present stage are shown. The linguistic significance of the study is due to the issue of preserving the linguo-culture, traditions and national identity by Russian Germans. Assimilation processes take on an irreversible character, and continuity in generations is lost. This is reflected in the loss of traditional culture elements and the language of the Germans as well as the perception of the culture- and language-related character / specificity of a foreign language environment. Despite the fact that the dialect has been lost by the younger generation, culinary traditions have proven to be one of the most stable elements of the culture of Russian Germans. Cooking recipes are a unique source for studying the phonetic and prosodic features of German dialects. The paper concentrates on the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of the German dialects in comparison to the standard German language (based on the cooking recipes of Russian Germans). For this reason, special attention is paid to the results of the electro-acoustic analysis. The authors calculated and analyzed average values for the basic prosodic characteristics. The material of the study was audio recording of the cooking recipes read by dialect and native speakers. The study of the dialects made it possible to detect deviations from the norm of the standard German language at the phonetic and prosodic levels: shift of vowel and consonant sounds, verb reduction, increased duration of the utterance, comparatively high intensity, relatively smooth movement of the pitch frequency with a decrease toward the end of the phrase. The analysis allowed us to determine key prosodic features of the German dialects (based on the cooking recipes) and map out aspects of their future studying.

The article deals with the semantics of the terms ӱrӱŋ and maŋan denoting white colour in the Yakut language. The aim of the article is to study the development of the words. The research material is based on lexicographical sources and the text of the epic poem - Olonkho. The novelty of this work is the comparative analysis of the Yakut colour terms with the South Siberian and Manchu-Tungus languages and establishment of their relationships. Two words having different origin and nature reflect different stages of language development and its historical connections. The term ӱrӱŋ dates back to ancient Eastern Turkic languages and has a sacred nature associated with early beliefs. The lexeme has a fixed distribution and retains the semantic structure. The adjective ӱrӱŋ has a great word-formation and phraseological potential; it is a component of complex words, pair-words and phraseological units. As in the Old Turkic language, the word performs the function of a noun. In the text, it acts as a permanent epithet to the word kӱn ‘sun’. Compared to the word ӱrӱŋ the term maŋan is an innovation, borrowed from the Mongolian language in connection with horse-breeding culture. Another loanword chaɤān is rarely used. Not only the adjective, but also the verb manxaix was borrowed from Mongolian into Yakut. In the adjective there was a semantic shift; in the Yakut language the meaning ‘white’ is updated, and the meaning ‘with an asterisk on the forehead’ fades into the background. In combination with other adjectives and nouns, the word maŋan forms compound color names that express different shades of white, as well as its saturation and brightness. The word maŋan has considerably expanded the area of use, replacing in some cases the function of the adjective ӱrӱŋ. In the epic text, the word serves as a permanent epithet of the word xallaan ‘heaven’. The word maŋan connects the Yakut language not only with the Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus languages, but also with the South Siberian languages, Khakass and Tuvan. In the system of colour terms, the word maŋan can be one of the common elements of the Siberian languages.

The article deals with the Christmas messages of two Spanish monarchs, Juan Carlos I and Philip VI, issued from 1975 to 2018. These texts are considered to be a ritual genre of institutional discourse and are analyzed in the context of political rhetoric. Since the restoration of the monarchy in Spain in 1975, the Spanish King’s Christmas messages are thought to be the main instrument of communication of the Head of State with his citizens. Although they do not have any legal status and belong to the realm of customs and traditions, these speeches receive wide media coverage because they are one of the few occasions when the monarch addresses the Spanish people on television. This paper highlights the idea that the messages are ideologically driven and politically motivated since their major purpose is to strengthen the image of the monarchy and to convince people of the necessity and advantages of peaceful coexistence, respect for the law, and national pride. The article also focuses on the images of the past, the future, the speaker, the addressee (Spanish society), and the country. The scientific value of this paper is in providing a comparative analysis of the communicative potential of the Christmas speeches issued by Juan Carlos I and Felipe VI. It was revealed that the two monarchs appealed to the same values and feelings of their people. Juan Carlos I and Felipe VI underlined the importance of peaceful coexistence in Spain, a highly democratic country where the monarch is the symbol of its unity and permanence. As for linguistic aspects, the speeches comply with the rules of classical oratory and are characterized by a set of common features: for instance, both monarchs employ the same rhetorical devices and communicative strategies in order to impact the audience and make the message more direct and influential. Nevertheless, Felipe VI makes his messages more personal, emotional and appealing, in comparison with the messages of his predecessor. The authors described invariant and variative features of the Christmas speeches issued by two Spanish monarchs taking into account some differences which can be explained by the social, economic and political context of modern Spain.

This paper elucidates the image of mother in the worldview of Russians and the Japanese on the basis of association experiments. Associative reactions obtained from Russian and Japanese respondents are listed along four semantic components - logical-notional, axiological-semantic, bodily-perceptive, and emotional-affective. Besides, the index of proximity is calculated for each pair of samplings analyzed. The language world view of Russians is scrutinized over two time periods. They are the early 1990s and the early 21st century. The language world view of the Japanese refers to the early 21st century. The image of mother in both linguocultures is predictably intertwined with the images of father, love, and children. It is noteworthy that the two Russian samplings demonstrate insignificant changes in the perception of the image of mother. The Japanese prove to be predominantly kinaesthetic when perceiving the environment as long as they associate mother with warmth that embraces a child and breast-feeding. For Russians, mother is primarily a woman and a parent, that is, her social functions predominate over her physical functions. The archetype of multi-child family used to be topical in the 1990s Russia, although the rate of childbirth was relatively low at the time due to economic problems. The Japanese and the Russians of the early 21st century lost this archetype. A large family was no longer a priority for them. Meanwhile, the image of mother is clearly vital for both linguocultures. This makes it possible to state the universal character of the image of mother. Another important observation is that Russian women of the early 1990s demonstrated unity in their treatment of current events. The experiments conducted have shown that the early 1990s saw an increase in mood swings for many people in Russia. However, Russian women turned out to be less affected by negative developments and more family-minded. One more important conclusion concerns the fact that male speech is ruder than female speech. This has been observed by other authors numerous times and has been confirmed in the association experiment discussed.

The stereotypes envisaged in this paper serve as a starting point for a research protocol aimed at corroborating the reality, in French languaculture, of the cultural value of stance-taking. The protocol adopted here is part of a research paradigm called applied ethnolinguistics, elaborated for use with and by foreign language students whose linguistic competence is sufficiently advanced to enable them to use their language resources to discover, through essentially (but not uniquely) linguistic means, the cultural values typically associated with the languaculture they study. Since the posited values are hypothetical, corroboration will be required. A specific protocol (the one illustrated here) has been set aside for this purpose. The cultural value of stance-taking will be presented in the form of a pedagogical script expressed in minimal French , a descriptive tool based on the French version of the natural semantic metalanguage. Precautions are taken to ensure that end-users of such scenarios are aware that they are dealing with generalisations (which are unavoidable as languacultures are never homogeneous).

The current paper is concerned with linguocultural (ethnolinguistic) analysis of australianisms as culture specific words which are either not found in British English (the mother tongue) or are different from their British counterparts to some extent. The main research question was to identify the key lexemes of this type and establish correlation between them and Australian values (the national identity) as well as ethnostereotypes in modern Australian society. The novelty of the approach to studying these lexical units is in looking at them in terms of their functioning in speech and pragmatics based on the most sensitive to social change and dynamic type of discourse - the media (The material was drawn for the national papers “The Daily Telegraph, Australia” and “The Australian” over the past decade). By means of the random selection method, definitional and contextual analyses six key concepts have been identified ( fair go, fair dinkum , larrikin , battler , bludger ,( hard ) yakka - the last word being aboriginal) and their place in the national identity structure defined. Also, we found some differences in how the same australianisms were presented and ranked in either paper manifesting certain values (for example, battler ) or anti-values (for example, bludger ) depending on the editorial board’s opinion and/or the content. For instance, “The Daily Telegraph” clearly highlighted the idea of justice (e.g. fair go , fair dinkum ), while “The Autralian” put more focus on praising the stubbornness of Australians in the struggle against various obstacles (e.g. battler ). References to the boisterous ( larrikin ) nature of Australians were somewhat more frequent “The Daily Telegraph”, although this concept was quite important for both newspapers. One of the most interesting results we got was a shift in connotations of several australianisms. Thus, it was shown that some words (for example, larrikin ), originally having a negative meaning, with time may become positively connoted, characterising a certain previously disapproved type of person / behavior as normal. The study can be continued to include more words of this type, especially aboriginal ones which are already used in media and call for ethnolinguistic (linguocultural) interpretation by researchers.

The following article considers the concepts of communicative situation, business discourse and business negotiations, as well as the specificity of their functioning. The research focuses on the cinematographic representation of communicative situation per se, which is of great interest within the field of business discourse. Taking into account sustained attention of present-day linguistics to institutional discourse in general and business discourse in particular, the need for a detailed study of the functioning of professional discourse seems quite urgent. As examples of the present study scenes of business negotiations from several American films were taken. The research rests on the componential structure of the communicative situation developed by Teun A. van Dijk (2008), which includes six basic elements inherent in any communicative situation. During the study, the following methods were applied: visual material analysis (which allows of considering a scene from a movie as a qualitative source of data, mainly in terms of non-verbal communication), method of text interpretation (which allows a researcher to single out typical patterns of behavior of businessmen during negotiations), continuous sampling method (which helps to identify language units that indicate personal characteristics of interlocutors) and a method of discourse analysis (allowing to distinguish discursive characteristics of business negotiations). As a result of the research, the presence of the components of the communicative situation identified by Teun A. van Dijk in situations of business negotiations in cinematography was confirmed. The functions performed by these components were analyzed, and the answers to the following questions were given: who performs the role of interlocutors in the situation of business negotiations, what kind of relations they hold, what message topics are common for a situation of negotiations, what are the key features of the speech and non-speech activity of business negotiations.

In this paper we shall focus on the two most well-known Russian versions of J. D. Salinger’s 1951 “The Catcher in the Rye”, produced by Rita Rait-Kovaleva and Maxim Nemtsov. Although Salinger’s magnum opus was rendered into Russian four times within only 12 years (1998-2010), it is in its old, yet still relevant Rait-Kovaleva’s version that Holden Caulfield’s voice resonates with the Russian reader. Moreover, none of the new translations has received enthusiastic reviews from interpreters or critics thus far. Nor has any of those updated and upgraded renditions won recognition of philologists. While Rait-Kovaleva’s “Over the Abyss in Rye” (back-translated) is by default considered more adequate, the comparative linguistic analysis tends to revolve around the single issue of the novel’s stylistically marked language. New versions often draw criticism due to the crude manner in which the outdated teenage slang is conveyed in them. That is especially true for Nemtsov’s version, which provoked furious public response when it came out, which is why we have opted for it to be compared against Rait-Kovaleva’s. No less significant, but more neglected is the question of the novel’s moral and philosophical value and the role it should be assigned in translation. The cognitive analysis of both texts, conducted with due regard to the original’s “stratum of schematized aspects” (R. Ingarden), has revealed conformity of Rait-Kovaleva’s text to the essential messages in Salinger’s novel. This proves she had succeeded in capturing the novel’s unfading merit. This assertion is substantiated by the comparative study of the two renditions, Rait-Kovaleva’s and Nemtsov’s. More importantly, the research has demonstrated the rightful priority the text’s moral and philosophical value should be assigned in translating a classic, which Salinger’s novel definitely is.

The current article considers the phenomenon of synaesthesia in a literary text on the material of the Russian and French languages. Our study proposes a new approach to a linguistic analysis of synaesthesia at the levels of words and word combinations. It introduces a systemic model describing groups of words related to sensory perception which serve as a basis for synaesthetic word combinations’ formation. The units of analysis were selected from a manually prepared author’s corpus of parallel texts including Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau ivre” and its 15 Russian translations. In order to classify the types of words related to sensory perception the notion of sensory semantic component (SSC) was introduced. The words were classified according to a number of criteria: the component criterion (number of SSCs within a word); the modal criterion (correlation with a sensory modality); the structural criterion (morphological structure of a word); and the criterion of semantic representation (the place of an SSC within a word’s semantics). At for the component criterion, all the words were classified by the number of SSCs as monocomponent (90 %) or multicomponent (10 %). If a word is classified as multicomponent, its SSCs can either belong to the same modality (and so, it is characterized as monosensory), or refer to different modalities (multisensory). The words from our corpus are generally monocomponent, i.e. they contain no more than one SSC. However, 10 % of the preselected words contain more than one SSC and are characterized by a complex morphological structure, representing, in fact, compounds. Multicomponent and complex words are typical only of the Russian part of the corpus. As far as the modal criterion is concerned, the French and Russian parts of the corpus provide similar results: sight appears to be the dominant modality for all the texts analyzed, whereas the sense of smell is the least common. As for the semantic representation of SSCs within a word’s meaning, this component is essential and determinant for 90 % of the units analyzed. The words containing SSCs belong to different parts of speech. In the French part of the corpus, the most common are adjectives (55 %), followed by nouns (27 %), verbs (9 %), participles I and II (9 %). As for the Russian texts, adjectives are also the most common (43 %), followed by nouns (35 %), verbs (14 %), participles I and II (5 %), gerunds (2 %), and adverbs (1 %).