The article features the results of contrastive analysis of phraseological creativity in two discourse types, cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature. In the study, we develop the parametric approach to linguistic creativity, with the parameter of phraseology displaying both language and discourse specific character. Two compiled subcorpora of cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature contingent in size, genre, creation period, addressee orientation and key pragmatic strategy, serve to explore the activity (frequency) distribution of phraseology as well as its creative language productivity. The Theory of Phraseological Creativity provides the criteria for demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseological units. Their further analysis in two subcorpora has shown that whilst their total activity in both discourses is similar, it is the cinematic discourse that demonstrates significant prevalence in phraseological modification, which evidences in favor of its higher discourse creativity potential. The study helped reveal the specificity in the phraseological modification strategies applied in cinematic discourse in contrast with discourse of children’s literature. Furthermore, we addressed the problem of parametric contingency which brought forward other criteria in demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseology in discourse. To explore the linguistic creativity parametric contingency, we assessed the joint activity of parameters correlating with phraseology use. Following the procedures of parametric activity processing in HETEROSTAT software and vector-space modelling, we received two discourse-specific phraseological contingency profiles. Their contrastive analysis revealed higher contingency values in the discourse of children’s literature. Moreover, it disclosed discourse-specific functional differences in creative and non-creative phraseology use in the discourse types contrasted. Whereas non-creative phraseological units in cinematic discourse displayed low correlation with other parameters of linguistic creativity, their creative uses displayed higher correlation. The same did not stand true for discourse of children’s literature, which demonstrated high correlation in both cases. Consequently, we concluded that the stimulating function is more typical of linguistic creativity parameters activation contingent with the creative uses of phraseology. In discourse of children’s literature apart from the stimulating function, the contingent parameters also display the compensatory function, with both functions stimulating the children’s comprehension of phraseology and simultaneously enhancing discourse creativity. The results suffice to show that the distribution of two functions – compensatory and stimulating – is discourse-specific, which extends the knowledge about linguistic and discourse creativity.

The article is devoted to non-prototypical structurally separate conditional constructions (NSCC) in Catalan in comparison with Spanish and French. These represent two (or more) separate sentences, one of which expresses condition and the other – consequence without conditional conjunctions. The relevance and novelty of this study follows from the fact that NSCCs have not received sufficient attention yet which is particularly true for Catalan. There is no consensus in specialist literature as regards the terms used to describe this kind of constructions or define their scope. The list of terms for NSCCs in Russian linguistics is too long, and includes the following: “non-prototypical constructions”, “conditional constructions formed as a “syntactic unity”, “supraphrasal unity”, among others. The paper states that it’s necessary to distinguish prototypical conditional constructions from the constructions with conditional con-junction “si”, on one hand, and non-prototypical constructions, on the other. And integral conditional constructions should be distinguished from structurally separate constructions (also referred to as formally separate). There are also non-prototypical structurally separate conditional constructions with interrogative words expressing condition in the protasis and imperatives constructions expressing consequence in the apodosis, constructions with imperatives (verbs like ‘suppose’) expressing condition in the protasis and interrogative sentences expressing consequence in the apodosis. NSCCs can use different moods: imperative, indicative, subjunctive, and conditional. Imperative forms are compatible both with semantics of conditions and consequences. There are also NSCCs without imperatives. And besides that, between the first sentence expressing the condition and the second sentence expressing the consequence filler utterances can occur. As typically in prototypical conditional constructions, in NSCC the condition and the consequence expressed also belong to the same subject of speech (speaker), though in some rare cases may be inserted, as a link be-tween the first and the second sentences of the construction, an interrogative sentence asked by another subject. NSCCs don’t allow the use of subordinating conjunctions, the opposite being a clear sign of prototypical constructions, but the consequence can be introduced with markers meaning ‘then’. The study is based on the texts by Catalan authors, excerpts from Catalan journals and their translations into Spanish and French; texts generated by the author’s informers, native speakers have also been used.

Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish speaking country on the African continent with Spanish being one of the official languages. The linguistic situation in the region has been closely studied by Russian and foreign linguists, however, toponymy as a whole linguistic layer has never been covered in numerous works on the functioning of the Spanish language in this state. The article presents the first attempt at a linguistic description of the Hispanic place names of Equatorial Guinea. By means of modern electronic systems, Hispanic geographical names of the region have been identified and structured. Along with indicating the historical prerequisites for the formation of toponyms of this type in this African state, the author pays attention to the linguistic situation in the country. Since gaining independence in 1968, the country’s domestic policy has largely focused on returning to African roots and replacing in the 1970s colo-nial geonames by African geonames at the expense of the so-called “authenticity” campaign. However, despite such renaming and the end of the era of Spanish political dominance in the region, the toponymic corpus of Equatorial Guinea in the 2020s contains a large number of Hispanic names, often showing linguistic contacts as blended names with elements from the languages of local African tribes. Calculating the percentage of Spanish toponominations from the total number of geographical units of the region, the author characterizes from a linguopragmatic point of view lo-cal hydronyms, oronyms, insulonyms, limnonyms and other units, both at the macro and micro levels. Numerous examples are given for each of the identified groups. It is noted that descriptive toponyms with a Spanish component, contrary to the tendency common for Spanish conquerors in other regions of the world, is not the most numerous group in Equatorial Guinea. Assumptions are made regarding the etymology of some units. The article contributes to toponymic research in the region and is the first step towards the creation of a toponymic dictionary for Equatorial Guinea.

The article presents structural models of terminological phrases from the subject area “Welding” as the basis for creating automated tools to mark up the corpus of scientific and technical texts. The place of scientific and technical corpora in corpus linguistics and the prospects for their further research are outlined. The relevance of the research stems from the need to create corpora of scientific and technical texts in general and to provide tools for automatic detection of terms in particular. It is substantiated that the main problem in designing such corpora is the automatic markup of terminological phrases. The analysis of the current state of the term system of the subject area “Welding” has been carried out. The results of the analysis of two-, three-, four- and five-component terminological phrases of “Welding” and their structural models are presented and illustrated by examples. The necessity of listing all possible structural models of terminological combinations has been substantiated too. It has been established that the addition of a new component to the basic terminological combination most often occurs with introduction of one more postpositional at-tribute whose function is to add some specific feature to the basic meaning. The novelty of the study is seen in providing a theoretical approach for the formation of a database of structural models of terminological phrases which may be used as a core of a supersource database on the structure of the multicomponent scientific and technical terms. An approach to automatic markup of multicomponent terms is proposed too. It will be also helpful in future corpus research for identification of candidate word combinations as scientific and technical terms.

Learner corpora serve as one of the most valuable sources of statistical data on learners' errors. For instance, data from foreign-language learners’ corpora can be used for the Second Language Acquisition research. However, corpora representativity strongly depends on the quality of its error markup, which is most frequently carried out manually and thus presents a time-consuming and painstaking routine for the annotators. To make annotation process easier, additional tools, such as spellcheckers, are usually used. This paper focuses on developing a program for automatic correction of derivational errors made by learners of Russian as a foreign language. Derivational errors, which are not common for adult Russian native speakers (L1), but occur quite often in written texts or speech of Russian as foreign language learners (L2) [Chernigovskaya, Gor, 2000], were chosen as scope of our research because correction of such mistakes presents a formidable challenge for existing spellcheckers. Using the data from the Russian Learner Corpus (http://www.web-corpora.net/RLC/), we tested two already existing approaches to solve such kind of problems. The first one is based on a finite state automaton principle developed by Dickinson and Herring 2008, and it was test-ed as algorithm for derivational errors detection. The second one which relies on the Noisy Channel model by Brill and Moore, 2000, was used for studying errors correction. After we analyzed effectiveness of these tests, we developed our own system for autocorrection of derivational errors. In our program the algorithm of Dickinson and Herring was used as word-formation error detection module. The Noisy Channel model has been rejected, and we decided to use instead the Continuous Bag of Words FastText model, based on Harris distributional semantics theory [1954]. In addition, filtering rules have been developed for correcting frequent errors that the model is unable to handle. To restore automatically the correct grammatical word form, dictionary of word paradigms is used. Model results were validated on the data of Russian Learner Corpus.

The images of motherland in Russian and Japanese linguocultures are juxtaposed on the basis of association experiments. Russian culture is analyzed along two samplings – that of the early 1990s and that of the early 21st century. In order to compare their data, relevant associative fields were first split into four major semantic components, namely: logical perception, moral and ethic perception, bodily perception, and emotional perception. It was demonstrated that in both linguocultures the image of motherland was perceived in large part positively. It was evidenced once again that Russians of both periods tended to epitomize individualism, while the Japanese were obviously collectivist. Predictably, the worldviews of Russian respondents of both time periods saw much more congruence than the worldviews of Russians (from both samplings) and the Japanese. Meanwhile, post-perestroika Russians weren’t inclined to reflect over the image of their motherland or critisize it which is most noticeably evidenced by the percent-age of data pertaining to components of the associative fields under study related to bodily perception. The reason for such a reflection fatigue lay highly likely in the cultural shock provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and ac-companied by the discredit of its public ideology. Such an attitude was not registered in 21st century Russians and the Japanese. Love for the wild nature of their respective countries is a characteristic feature mostly of the 1990s Russians and the Japanese, but not salient in the 21st century Russians who expressed it to a lesser extent.

The paper presents an analysis of (de)legitimization in American pre-election discourse based on the tactics of appealing to “authorities”, any entity, person or value which continue to retain confidence, have credibility or are otherwise entitled to authority in the society and family. Sixty 2020 election campaign speeches of U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris were the material of this case study. Our research approach is based on theoretical and methodological findings of linguopersonology and political linguistics. The main methods used are those of intent, semantic and stylistic analysis. The purpose was to identify, describe and categorize the authorities cited by the two politicians during their campaign and to correlate them to voters’ aspirations in the cities and states involved. The analysis of relevant contexts revealed that the choice of authorities is primarily guided by the expectations of target groups of voters to whom the campaign speech is addressed. For this reason, the pre-election discourse of the politicians under study includes the authorities which are important for different target groups of voters addressed all over the country. The study of the American pre-election discourse yields a general classification of authorities to which both politicians are appealing; it includes famous politicians, public figures, renowned experts, scientists, outstanding representatives of the culture and art. The politicians may also appeal to the authority of the speaker himself, their parents (mom, dad); edifying example of ordinary people (not celebrities); authority of high positions; authority of institutions and bodies; authority of universal values; authority of different kinds of texts (reports, laws, Scriptures), and sometimes authority of some mass media sources. The multiplicity of the authorities represented in our classification is explained in the paper as a logical consequence of addresser-addressee interaction. It also reeals the important role of the politician’s personality to appeal at a rally to “authorities” that might in his opinion be attractive for his specific audience. The paper presents the results of the analysis of the linguistic features of the appeal-to-authority tactics.

This article is devoted to the stylistic and cognitive analysis of the legal vocabulary in the third volume of Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” used in order to describe mental, psychological and cultural world of Guermantes in its contrast with the world of bourgeoisie and with that of French peasants. The legal terms we consider in the paper are used by Proust as core components of a number of stylistic figures, first of all, similes and metaphors. Following Gérard Cornu and some other scholars, we understand legal terminology (legal terms and legal vocabulary in general) as any word of language (in our case, those of French) having at least one legal meaning, acknowledged by an authoritative French dictionary. The legal terms identified in the text were classified into two groups: general legal vocabulary and specific legal vocabulary belonging to different branches of law: constitutional, criminal, international. In order to confirm their legal semantics while conducting contextual analysis, we have consulted all types of diction-aries: bilingual, monolingual, general and special ones. The main aim of the article was to determine the functions of these figures in Marcel Proust’s text whose poetics is not at all legal. To achieve it, the main task was to identify the connections between the denotative meaning of a given term and its connotative contextual transformations. This means first of all to decode contextual links between the legal figure under analysis and various domains of life it was applied to by Proust. Eventually, this analysis helps to reveal French cultural codes, those of declining aristocracy, empowered bourgeoisie and, in “Guermantes”, of peasantry. Thus, the Guermantes are associated in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, represented by Marcel, with something ancient, inaccessible to rational minds, charming: some sublime images, magical legends of ancient times, exquisite works of art and music, antique music instruments. In this context, a legal term, such as carte photographique d’identité for instance, introduces, by contrast, some materially-minded, pragmatic, prosaic notes. At the same time, democratic changes leading to the rise of the bourgeoisie, as well as the world of peasants are depicted in an extremely concrete way, being associated with the untamed force of nature: damage and devastation caused by the floods, noises, and the like. At the same time, various typical human feelings, such as Marcel’s admiration and Saint-Loup’s love due to the use of legal figures may be represented as imprisonment.

Metaphor in modern linguistics is understood not only as a means of decorating speech, but also as a means of structuring, transforming and creating new knowledge, evoking emotions, influencing the perception. The article aims to estimate the potential speech impact of the military doctrines’ texts with the help of the metaphor power quantitative index. The methodology is based on calculating the indices of metaphor density (MDI), intensity (MII) and functionality of metaphors in the text (MfPI). The theoretical basis of the research is the conceptual metaphor theory by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson, as well as ideas about the metaphor power and the potential persuasiveness of metaphors in the text and discourse, most fully presented in the works on meta-analysis of the metaphor speech impact by P. Sopory and S. van Stee. Thus, we assume that the higher the density of metaphors in the text, the higher is the per-suasiveness of the given speech message. Metaphors of different intensity are based on two different cognitive mechanisms, namely, categorization and comparison, and affect the recipient in different ways, since they are perceived differently by him. Conventional metaphors tend to have a so-called cognitive effect, and new “creative” metaphors, in turn, may have a considerable emotional impact. Different types of metaphors also have different functions: orientational metaphors perform a descriptive function, ontological metaphors are used to explain (translate) complex objects and phenomena, identifying them in the mind of recipients, structural metaphors serve the purpose of restructuring the signified (le signifié in terms of Saussure) of an object or phenomenon, changing the recipient’s point of view on the subject. The material under study includes the latest published doctrinal military documents – the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation (2014), the White Paper “China’s Defense in the New Era” (2019), and a Summary of the US National Defense Strategy (2020). The empiric results of the study show that the metaphor power of the Chinese text in comparison with American English and Russian is higher in terms of the density and intensity of the metaphors used, which indicates the intention to make the White Paper more convincing and emotionally affecting. “The US National Defense Strategy” is less saturated with novel metaphors, but at the same time it uses a greater number of structural metaphors, which indicates the intention to produce a cognitive declarative impact rather than emotional effect. The text of the Russian Military Doctrine has the lowest indices of the density and intensity of metaphors; the number of structural metaphors found in it was also the smallest, which leads us to conclude that this document highlights the informative function, having the identifying nature. The method of metaphor power analysis proposed and tested in this study allows us to single out two different types of speech impact – emotional and cognitive –, as well as makes it possible to express quantitatively their degree. In addition, the values of the metaphorical indices can be used to specify the genre and style of texts under study.

The article analyzes verbs with the prefix при- in a Russian literary work and its Chinese translation from the linguistic perspective. The relevance of the work is determined by the need to overcome intercultural barriers that arise as a result of insufficient comparative analysis of Russian prefixed verbs and their Chinese equivalents in terms of semantics. The purpose of the article is to identify the semantic characteristics of the word-formation prefix при- which determine the meaning of verbs in the Russian literary fiction and its Chinese translation.

To achieve this goal, we have formulated the following objectives: 1) to present the main meanings of the prefix при- in the verbs selected from “Revizor” by N. V. Gogol; 2) to find out the main ways of translating the Russian verbs with this prefix the above literary work into Chinese; 3) to identify national and cultural specifics of the translation of the prefix при- into the Chinese language.

The sources of materials are contexts, containing verbs with the prefix при-, from the comedy “The Inspector General” by N. V. Gogol. The methods used are a comparative, a semantic, and a linguo-cognitive types of analyses.

The novelty of the research is that it is by far the first attempt to: 1) analyze the verbs with the prefix при- in the Russian literary work and in the Chinese translated text based on the comparative, semantic, and linguo-cognitive types of analyses; 2) find out the main methods of translating verbs with the prefix при- from Russian into Chinese; 3) reveal some national and cultural features of the translation of this prefix into Chinese. In our opinion, the results obtained during the analysis are relevant for the study of such branches of linguistics as grammar, word formation, semantics, as well as cognitive linguistics and theory and practice of translation.

The scope of the term “aljamiado literature” is still open to discussion because it is defined differently by scholars in Russia and beyond. In the ‘strict’ literal meaning, the term “aljamiado literature” covers the literature in Spanish written in Arabic script. Its texts were mostly created by the Moriscos (or crypto-Muslims for Spanish people) after the Reconquista and before their expulsion (1609–1614), i. e. mainly during the 16^th century.

In a broader sense, “aljamiado literature” is defined as the literature of Spanish Muslims in general, and in this case it is meant to include both Arabic and Latin scripts. And it refers therefore not only to the literature of the Moriscos before their expulsion, but also relates to that written after their expulsion in Latin script, as well as to the texts produced, also in Latin script, by the Spanish Muslims before the Reconquista known in literary culture as Mudéjars. This broader definition covers the period from the mid-15^th century until late 17^th century.

Sure, using the term “aljamiado literature” to denote the texts of both the Mudéjars and the Moriscos, i. e. all the texts of Spanish Muslims that had to live outside Al-Andalus, is absolutely correct, but at the same time this raises doubts about whether we may employ the terms “aljamiado literature” or “aljamiado literature of the Moriscos” for describing all the phenomena mentioned above. 

In this article, taking into account relevant cultural and historical circumstances which shaped this literary phenomenon and related concepts we have described in detail this contradictory usage of the term “aljamiado literature” and suggested a more adequate definition of its scope.

The anthropological turn in humanitarian thought stimulated the interest in studying the linguistic personality and individual translator's style. The paper analyses that of A. A. Stolypin (Mongo), a well-known person to the specialists of Russian literature due to his relationships with Mikhail Lermontov, a famous Russian poet. The publication of Lermontov’s novel “A Hero of Our Time” became at the time a significant event in the emerging literary life of Russia marked by Western aesthetic influences. The first French translation of this emblematic novel appeared in 1843 in the Parisian newspaper “La Démocratie pacifique: journal des intérêts des gouvernements et des peuples”. It was made by mentioned above A. A. Stolypin (Mongo), the poet’s close relative and comrade-in-arms who had reasons to leave Russia for some time. The philologists have long known about this translation, but it never became the subject of a close analysis. Filling the existing gap, we aim to introduce this notable translation into scientific circulation. The present paper is part of our research project which is based on Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope, since the road chronotope is a crucial component of Lermontov’s novel. Coupled with the concept of “thematic grid” by I. V. Arnold, it forms the theoretical framework for the current study. To enhance its statistical validity, we trans-formed the Russian edition of the novel and Stolypin’s French translation into digital research corpus. Through the lens of the above theoretical tools, we view the most frequent lexical units denominating the specific road realities, including those of the North Caucasus, as they are key thematic characteristics of time and place. Therefore, their interpretation may serve to evaluate the reproducibility of the “thematic grid” and reveal the nature of the most consistently repeated trаnslator’s solutions. An additional contextual analysis using the reverse translation completes the data and serves for a more detailed and contrasted illustration of the translator’s style. Our analysis reveals the existence of a certain “blurring” of the “thematic grid” in the target text generally due to the use of specification of meaning, hyponyms instead of terms with a broader meaning. But this feature of Stolypin’s translator style does not hinder the adequate recreation of the source text and allows the reader to feel the originality of the time and space in which the events, closely related to the Caucasus Mountain region, developed.

The monograph is devoted to the descriptive analysis of the translation of scientific texts from Russian into Chinese based on corpus linguistics methods. The norms of translation, the issues of specificity and universality, as well as the influence of the characteristics of the source text on the translation text are discussed, in other words, the set of factors that influence the translation is investigated.