The article concerns the study of M. V. Lomonosov’s “Russian Grammar” sections which describe the phonetic structure of the Russian language, including segmental and suprasegmental levels, as well as the corresponding paragraphs in the German translation of this grammar made by Johann Stavenhagen in 1764. The main purpose of studying these text sources is selection of phonetic terminology used by Lomonosov and its comparison with German terminology in the structural and semantic perspective to establish conformity between Stavenhagen’s translation solutions and the author’s intentions in the terminological sphere. The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that at present there are practically no comparative studies devoted to the study of Lomonosov’s grammar and its translation into German in terms of parallel text metalanguage. Russian linguists have mostly focused on the original Russian text published in 1755, plenty of publications being concerned with its description and analysis, as well as with the historical and linguistic aspect of the German version of Lomonosov’s grammar design. The main research methods are those of vocabulary structural, semantic, definitional, and comparative types of analysis. While studying the selected Russian vocabulary, we have identified five thematically different terminological groups: 1) terms characterizing the suprasegmental level of utterance (intonation and prosody), 2) terms nominating articulation organs, 3) terms used to classify vowels and consonants, 4) terms of graphics and orthography, 5) units of articulation. Terminological units found in previous grammatical publications make up its main part. The author’s terminology, introduced for scientific use by Lomonosov himself appear to be a smaller part of the selected vocabulary. When translating the “Russian Grammar”, Stavenhagen primarily resorted to literal translation of phonetic terms employed by Lomonosov, and in some cases to a descriptive way of conveying the semantics of certain Russian terms in accordance with the norms of the German language of that time. A terminological comparative analysis allows identifying a number of orthographic and morphological doublets in the Russian and German phonetic terminological systems. The use of doublets agrees with the author’s and translator’s wish to make a grammar text more understandable to the reader.

The paper is dedicated to the reconstruction of the Nizhniy Novgorod text in the Russian culture based on the travelers’, writers’, publicists’, and politicians’ impressions found in their travel notes, stories, and essays. In the process of reconstruction the Nizhniy Novgorod text recreates some non-trivial senses, similar to all the documents concerned. In many predicate descriptions Nizhniy Novgorod is described as a beautiful Russian town, a third capital of Russia, a European or provincial town, an orthodox or trade center, as well as a market and money-grabbing place. To understand why such controversial properties are applied to the town we should try and get the essence of these judgments: topography, historical events and legends, urban structure, fair activities, the residents’ manners and customs, etc. These contradictions can be solved by defining conflicting judgments (i) in different time intervals: military in earlier times, trading now; hot in summer, cold in winter; (ii) in different loci: with regard to the Kremlin, the Otkos and the Alexander promenade it is beautiful, magnificent and picturesque; with regard to numerous churches and monasteries it is orthodox by God; with regard to the Tolkuchka and the Millionka on a market day it is greedy and money-grubbing; with regard to restaurants, pubs and crack houses near the Fair, it is sloppy drunk, dirty and dissolute; (iii) with regard to different attitudes or opinions: obnoxious, dirty and rude to some, well-managed, prosperous, charitable and delicate to others.

The study deals with making a distinction between the terms “concept” and “notion”, on the one hand, “frame”, “gestalt” and “image”, on the other. The survey shows that the researchers are not unanimous in their opinion regarding both the typology of cognitive structures and their content. Relevant classifications indicate clearly that frame, gestalt and image are most regular categories, so, understanding their content, apart from their relationship to each other with-in the framework of modern linguistics, is of particular interest to us. In the study, these concepts are considered in the following ways: a relevant scientific source survey, term definitions, key features, illustrations, and comparative research to distinguish between the equivalence, proximity, and contiguity degrees of the characteristics revealed. Based on such a systemic analysis, it has been found that gestalt, image and frame are categories of the external world conceptualization distinguished on the basis of their structural, functional and semantic features. As a result, it concludes, the categories “frame”, “gestalt” and “image” might be considered as contiguous concepts.

Semantic studies of verbal lexemes as a special class of words that are significant and central in the sentence remain an urgent issue in modern linguistics. The article reveals the functioning of standards of comparison (the term introduced be Maya Cheremisina to denote common natural references used in comparative constructions to evaluate, estimate or grade the effect caused by an action) with the verbs meaning “negative impact on the object”. The study is based on the material of the Yakut language and literature. The paper uses a lexico-semantic approach and the method of continuous sampling for collecting the material from lexicographic sources and fiction.

Verbs of physical negative impact on the object are divided into the following subgroups: 1) verbs damaging an object; 2) verbs striking an object; 3) verbs of great impact on the object, harming it up to bringing it to death. In comparative constructions with the verbs of this lexical-semantic group two types prevail: 1) constructions using the affix -lyy; 2) constructions with the postposition kurduk ʽas if, likeʼ. In comparative constructions, the situational-emotional type of comparison is more common. Standards of comparison are used mainly when describing a mental state, various situations or the appearance of something. Verbs with the meaning of striking as a standard of comparison in the Yakut language are mainly used to describe sudden shock or confusion. Verbs with the meaning 'beat with a whip, rod or willow' and verbs with the meaning ʽsting, buttʼ are compared to an action that occurs all of a sudden, impetuously. Verbs with the meaning ʽhit, prick, stab a thing with an objectʼ are used when comparing an action with a description of any sound, noise or physiological actions that happen with the body. Verbs with the meaning 'deteriorate an inanimate object or damage some part of it' are mainly used to describe the appearance of something.

The military rank is one of the most important indicators of the personal level achieved by a serviceman in relation to other servicemen within the established nationwide hierarchical system. Military ranks help establish relationships of subordination and seniority between military personnel, compliance with the positions held, and the age limit for military service and in the reserve. Military ranks are insignia of military personnel. The system of military ranks in each country has its own characteristics and origin. Military ranks in the Russian and Vietnamese armies vary depending on the historical period. The formation of the system of personal military ranks went through the centuries-old stages of their evolution. As we know, the changes taking place in society are reflected in the language in the form of an appropriate vocabulary design. Military nomenclature terminology is a special layer of the lexical composition of any language. As a specific layer of military vocabulary, on the one hand, it reflects a direct impact of extralinguistic factors on the language, and on the other hand, it contributes to the manifestation of certain general trends in the development and functioning of the national language. In this article, we will consider the system of military ranks in the armed forces of the Russian Federation and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from a synchronous point of view. The article gives a general description of the system of military ranks, reveals the features of the vocabulary denoting military ranks in the Russian Federation and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, highlights the use of words denoting military ranks in Russian and Vietnamese languages in communication and in official records. The results of the presented work may have a certain significance for lexicography and translation practice.

Studying professional discourse, a researcher has now an opportunity to create collections of texts and apply linguistic analysis software tools to them. However, when it comes to Chinese discourse there is a problem with the reliability of automatic word segmentation of texts. One of the ways to extract lexical units in Chinese texts is to apply statistical association measures for collocations to Chinese character bigrams. The purpose of this work is to conduct a comparative analysis of seven different statistical measures for collocations as a means of extracting two-syllabic lexical units (binomes) in an unsegmented Chinese character text. The subject of the analysis is the lexical, grammatical and frequency characteristics of bigrams with higher values of the statistical measures. Their comparison makes it possible to draw a conclusion about the features of statistical measures, in particular, about the best correspondence of linguistic tasks to statistical measures. The linguistic material of the study was a collection of 560 military-related news texts in Chinese with more than 720 thousand characters. The results show that the statistical measures considered can be divided into three groups according to the characteristics of bigrams receiving the highest values. The first group includes measures MI, MS and logDice, which give priority to rare bigrams with limited compatibility of components, such as the Chinese two-syllable single morpheme words “lianmianzi”. These measures do not extract terms well, but can be used to search for phraseologically related components. The measures of the second group, t-score and log-likelihood, are frequency-oriented, similar to frequency analysis, but they cope with non-lexical bigrams better, while log-likelihood somewhat lowers the rank of numerals and pronouns, picking out best the typical vocabulary of professional discourse. The third group includes measures MI3 and MI.log-f, which average the opposite approaches of the first two groups. The MI3 measure is considered to be the most universal one; it could be used to compare different corpora or collections of texts. It is concluded that applying statistical association measures to Chinese character bi-grams is possible and appropriate, when taking into account the correspondence of their specifics to a research task.

This article presents the results of an EEG-based study of peculiarities of brain oscillatory activity in the process of language learner task performance (based on the German language). The aim of the study was to reveal neuro-physiological indicators making it possible to claim a significant difference between the ways of information input when considering language learner activity at the neurolinguistic level. The methodological approach in the experimental group was based on P. Ya. Galperin’s theory of stage-by-stage formation of mental activity and language consciousness, according to which the learner’s native language becomes a language model that helps him/her acquire general linguistic mechanisms and then transfer the skill formed to the process of mastering German, gradually making the rejection of the learner’s native language possible. The results obtained allow us to claim the existence of certain differences between the groups of subjects, consisting in smaller amplitude of the P300 peak and its smaller duration with the experimental group in comparison with the control one. Less activity in the alpha range for the experimental group was found. Taken together, these parameters may suggest less difficulty (compared to the control group) in completing language tasks by the learners. The results of the study will serve as a neuro- and psycho linguistic basis for the development of information and communication technologies in teaching German on the basis of the existing linguodidactic course leading to the language proficiency test in accordance with international requirements of EFRL. The effectiveness of P. Ya. Galperin’s activity theory, Type 3, confirmed by neuro- and psycholinguistic parameters, can constitute an alternative basis for the development of digital learning programs based so far in foreign and Russian applications on the Ebbinghaus curve.

The paper describes the results of topic modelling of short prose fiction based on three methods, namely Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the Structural Topic Model (STM), and the Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), combined with different text preprocessing options (all parts of speech vs. only nouns). The experimental design is tested on the basis of the Corpus of Russian Short Stories of 1900–1930s. The research made it possible to determine the specifics of the algorithms under consideration and to assess the effectiveness of their application for the qualitative analysis of fiction texts.

The contemporary communicative environment is mostly visual, which means that traditional linguistic techniques of concept formation studies have to be revised. The concept COVID-19 pandemic has been unfolding in the language consciousness of the global community for about three years. It is valuable material for a psycholinguistic experiment since it allows researchers to study the initial stage of concept formation, whereas associative experiments based on words that denote familiar phenomena or concepts are strongly affected by linguo-cultural environment. The present psycholinguistic experiment features a modified continuous associative test based on the concept COVID-19 with a total of 1,122 verbal reactions. The experiment consisted of three parts and involved 100 respondents. The first test featured the verbal stimulus “coronavirus infection (COVID-19)” and produced 356 reactions; the second one was based on a media-popularized image of the virus (380 reactions), and the third one introduced a combined visual-verbal stimulus (386), i.e. a picture and its verbal description. The obtained data were processed with the help of the semantic gestalt method developed by Yu. N. Karaulov. In the first test, featuring the verbal stimulus, the respondents tried to disclose the essence of the phenomenon, while in the second test the visual stimulus triggered associations with shape and appearance. The third visual-verbal stimulus produced more neutral reactions. These results confirm the assumption that the visual stimulus is mostly related to shape, color, texture, and other physical characteristics. The verbal stimulus evoking mostly negative associations, confirms the direct connection of the verbal stimulus and the essence of the phenomenon (the referent). So, the concept COVID-19 finds the following description in the linguistic worldview of Russian youth: coronavirus is a dangerous lethal disease that causes much fear, is characterized by fever, cough and loss of smell and can be prevented by such measures as wearing face masks, quarantine, self-isolation, social distancing, and using QR-codes. The virus resembles a planet, a ball, a flower or a fungus. The modified verbal-visual continuous associative test proved to have an increased information potential, which provides a greater amount of linguo-cognitive information than the conventional experiment based on a verbal stimulus.

Intellectual pursuits in general and in translation particularly cannot be conceptualized without resorting to metaphorical means relating this experience to more perceptible ones. In European languages the metaphor in question is TRANSLATION IS MOVEMENT / RELOCATION. The terms for translation in various European languages (translatio(n), traduction, perevod) all imply the idea of relocation of a physical object. Translatare and traducere, the latter introduced by Italian humanists, find parallels (prēlozhiti and prēvoditi respectively) in Slavic prologues of the period. Although its verbal realization is conventional and even trite now, this conceptual metaphor has survived in lexemes designating the agent, the process and the result of translation activity. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the terms used by several late antique, medieval, and modern translators in their prologues, epilogues, and metatexts on translation, and especially vivid metaphorical imagery that regularly appear in their texts. This fact must not be neglected by translation theory. All the constituents of translation process, namely, agents, source and target texts, translation method, the signifier (lesignifiant) and the signified (le signifié) in the translated text, the process of translation and the life of the translated text in a new culture are discussed metaphorically. The agent of the activity under study (translator) is mostly represented via the metaphor of a master’s (author’s) servant, although sometimes the relationship between the author and the translator is envisioned as a competition or even a conquest. The motivation behind translators’ endeavor is often discussed in terms of the monetary “talent” parable (where talentum is a unit of weight) quoted or alluded to by Aelfric in England and John the Exarch in Bulgaria in the 10th century and Marie de France and Theodosius from the Cave Monastery in Kiev two centuries later. The relationship between source and target texts is illustrated with an artistic metaphor, among others. The signified and the signifier in the text are often presented as a body and clothing or a jewel and its wrappings. The translation process is often shown as that of construction in medieval texts and work of machinery in modern ones. The life of the target text in its new surroundings is discussed through revitalizing the old metaphor of relocation (as the cargo of a ship unloaded onto a distant shore) or through various biological metaphors.

The article deals with the analysis of the interaction between legal terms and cultural concepts in Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”). Our primary concern is to contribute to the studies of the relations between the language of professional communication and general communication language within a literary text, and, therefore, to examine the functioning of legal and general vocabulary in the novel. Much has been done in the field of special terms and neutral lexis classification in professional language, but undoubtedly, just as much remains to be done. The analysis of different types of stylistic devices has been widely presented in specialized literature. It would be reasonable to study French legal terms from the point of view of their polysemy as well as from a larger perspective of the interaction between legal culture and culture in general. What we are aiming at is to establish some correspondences of legal concepts to those of everyday life, and above all, their relations with other allusions in the general culture domain. To attain our aim we should look at the legal concepts we detected within a larger context of their functioning. Our analysis reveals that the writer uses legal terms and legal concepts in order to describe some characters of the novel and to represent certain aspects of the social reality he depicts. Love relationship between Marcel and Albertine is illustrated with some examples from the domains of civil, criminal and financial law, which is not usually associated with such a theme. Multiple allusions to various cultural phenomena of legal culture and of culture in general, namely classical theatre and painting, the history of Ancient Greece and Rome express the author’s irony by contrast.