The article considers café, restaurant, and street food shop names related to eastern/oriental (Middle Asian and Caucasian) cuisine that has recently become extremely popular in Russia, especially so in Moscow, with regard to their ethnic identity. The naming system of the above ergonyms, being part of urbanonyms, has revealed both activization of old Russian assimilated gastronomic orientalisms and an influx of new ones, highly creative on different language levels.

A complex analysis of about 500 ergonyms in public catering, randomly selected from respective sites and partially from street signs and ads, has shown, on the one hand, a tendency towards fusion of various eastern cuisines with one of them dominating, and on the other hand, we observe a kind of specialization (diversity) in oriental cuisine and gastronomic terms. The following language and discursive ethnic identical devices have been found: use of specific toponyms and ethnonyms employed in isolation and in combination with the words ‘restaurant’ or ‘café’; names of top traditional dishes (culinary terms), products, plants, artefacts, kitchen attributes; personal names with transparent inner form; culturally marked precedent phenomena (including utterances), and abstract words; parallel usage of Russian and Latin types, their hybrid form as well as Russian type imitating eastern style.

Language and discursive diversity of the thematic group “Eastern cuisine”, in our opinion, indirectly contributes to forming a more positive image of the eastern (Middle Asian & Caucasian) immigrants in the Russian citizens’ minds compared to that of about ten years ago, as a result of which Russians are taking a far greater interest in the Middle Asians’ and Caucasians’ cultural values.

The results of the research may enrich modern Eastern borrowing dictionaries, help systematize their terminology and be of use in such courses as Cultural linguistics, Inter-(cross-) cultural communication, and Urbanology.

The study deals with testing a specialized text corpus on the example of a number of cognitive linguistic terms with the hypernym frame. The corpus includes a subcorpus of scientific texts and a subcorpus of journalistic texts. The former is represented by 13 journals indexed in the RSCI; the latter one is represented by 10 significant Russian newspapers & magazines. The collected texts were lemmatized and tokenized, as well as automatically marked up using the Universal Dependencies standard. The corpus is used for creating a learner’s cognitive linguistic term dictionary. This lexicographic source includes 60 major terms in the university disciplines within cognitive sciences. The novelty of the approach is due to the thesaurus-encyclopedic type of dictionary which allows scholars to describe the word both as a term (a minimal component of scientific knowledge) and as a unit of scientific text in its various collocations and ontological relations (synonymy, quasi-synonymy, class-subclass; polysemy, etc.). The basis for describing the term systemic relations is corpus statistics: analysis of concordances, collocations, and n-grams. The results of using a specialized text corpus are presented on the example of a terminological field with the dominant frame. With the help of concordance lists, contexts of term usage are revealed and its derivational relations are established. The semantic and grammatical relationships of the term are characterized through n-grams analysis. Synonyms, hyponyms, hyperonyms of the term are described based on the study of collocations. The Dashinimaeva-Wang hypothesis about the links between the terms ‘concept’, ‘frame’, ‘gestalt’, and ‘image’ was also tested. Briefly characterized were the semantic transformations of the scientific term in the media discourse. Besides, systemic relations of the terms identified on the basis of corpus statistics were confirmed by the method of interpretative analysis of the contexts obtained from concordance lists. The data of automatically selected associative measures also largely agree with the results of the associative experiment carried out in the framework of the study.

The article analyzes speech characteristics of the characters of the film “Class” depicting French immigrants’ children. The teenagers study at one of the suburb Paris colleges. They communicate with each other and teachers in the form of a dialogue. The adolescents intentionally tend to ignore the rules of behavior established by the educational institution and neglect the norms of the codified French language. Using artistic images, the film reproduces one of the most topical social problems in modern France — that of immigrants’ resistance to accepting French cultural values, customs, codes, language, and speech culture.

The characters’ speech determines their nationality, social status, personal values, and emotional state. Sampling, the linguistic and stylistic types of analysis were employed as research methods. The teenagers use verlanized and obscene lexical units, words from the young immigrant argot developed by borrowing, neologizing, and rethinking outdated French words. The verlan and special colloquial lexical units that characters use contain negative emotional and evaluative connotations. The insults, rudeness, name-calling, familiarity between immigrant children are ritual, intra-group, sociocultural, harmless, directed against the culture, language, economic dominance of the French-speaking ethnos in the society.

The adolescent verbal behavior expresses a pejorative assessment of the French culture, language and people. The children ignore school rules and neglect standard French. Verlanisms, youth slang/argot, aggression are considered as the reaction of young immigrants to the requirement to learn standard French and behavioral rules of the French society, rejection by the ethnic French, lack of opportunities to rise in life, a sign of psychological trauma, as well as hardships.

Based on the review of the research by Russian scholars on different types of verbs, the article looks at the English verbs of speaking and those of transmitting information. Information transmission verbs as a part of verbs of speaking may be divided into verbs of informing and verbs of requesting information. The componential analysis employed in these verbs analysis helped distinguish a number of differentiating semes in their definitions. As a result, verbs of informing were divided into seven groups: “training / preparation”, “official setting + a large number of people”, “negative / secret information”, “explanation, clarification”, “basic information”, “true / false information”, “additional information”. Verbs of requesting information include five groups: “official request”, “a large number of questions”, “information search”, “receiving information”, “study of information”.

The article analyzes the language and cultural code of lullaby songs and maternity incantations (algyss) which belong to the oldest layer of the Yakut folklore. The addressees are the patron goddesses of clans Aiysyt and the guardian goddesses Ieyekhsit. Understanding of the cultural text language leads to the finding of prototypical conceptual meanings in the consciousness of the ancient Sakha. The novelty of the research lies in the identification of the sign nature of lullabies and incantations, which until now have not been the subject of interest for the Yakut linguists. The aim of the paper is to analyze the semiotic signs and symbols of lullaby songs and maternity spells in semiosphere of the Sakha culture. The article is based on archival materials and published folklore texts. Archaic texts are endowed with magical functions: procreative and apotropaic. In the ritual songs, especially in the rites of transition, both the action code and the sound code (moaning, sound repetitions, the manner of singing: diyeretiya or daegeretiyaҥ) are combined and coexist. Sound behavior in the house of a woman in labor during and after the delivery is strictly regulated. Special sacredness is expressed by allegorical messages about the approach of childbirth, which are expressed by the time code. A syntagmatic series of auspicious signs is presented: the numerical characteristic is joined by color and spatial ones, which model the theme of creation of the Universe and Man. The theme of creation is presented through the technological code of making the cradle. The ambivalence of archaic representation generated by the anthropic functions time/birth, our own/foreign, up/down, and death/life is observed. The symbol of the child is traditionally an egg and a bird, as for gender terms, the symbol of a boy is a knife, the symbol of a girl is a scissor. Wishes for the child’s good fortune are displayed by the concept of cold, which preserves the fact of the negative attitude of the Sakha people from the south to the northern Arctic climate. The sound song code is expressed by a set of cultural codes: the action code, which is defined as a set of ritual and ceremonial actions to achieve the hearing of the patron goddess of childbirth; the time code, corresponding to the three-dimensional universe; the spatial code, represented by the eight-member horizontal and nine-tier vertical model. Sign systems of folk culture functioning in lullabies and incantations are inseparable from their pragmatics. They are “folded messages” which eventually represent archetypal beliefs of ancient Sakha, which are deciphered as a result of semiotic and linguistic research.

This paper is based on the Scollon & Scollon’s place semiotics framework combined with the Kress & van Leeuwen’s multimodal theory and Sockett and other scholars’ informal learning theories. By means of qualitative and quantitative methods, the leading function of the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape in teaching Chinese to foreigners is analyzed. It is shown that the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape plays a leading role at the initial stage of the Chinese language acquisition. This role is based on the main function of the Confucius Institute and is manifested in three mechanisms: attracting attention, shaping an image, and stimulating further learning of Chinese. The results show that to be effective in international communication, mastering Chinese should not be limited to classroom teaching, but it should also focus on various language practices outside the classroom. The linguistic landscape of the Confucius Institute serves as a supplement to classroom teaching, and the visual space it provides is obviously different from that of Chinese textbooks and test papers which are mainly focused on text reading. In addition to keywords, linguistic landscapes also provide other symbolic means, such as multimodal visual media, image symbols, plate-like structures, and color patterns. This pioneering method of teaching can greatly enhance foreign students’ cognition and understanding of the Chinese culture and their interest in learning Chinese. Linguistic landscape and Chinese classroom teaching complement each other in teaching Chinese internationally. To sum up, this research focuses on the leading function of the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape, attempting to explore its mechanism and role in the international spread of the Chinese language.

This paper describes the results of the open text data study, and on the basis of these data the features of the communicative interaction of individuals with mobile applications have been identified. Using the method of automatic data collection and analysis, 150 applications from the Google Store were analyzed in order to highlight the facts that motivate an individual’s entry into a communicative act with a mobile application. The article provides visualization of the text structures. Based on the data obtained, it was possible to identify the main characteristics of the communicative interaction of a user with the application; in particular, some hypotheses were put forward regarding the linearity of the communicative model used by individuals.

Product reviews are an important feature of e-commerce because they influence the communicative behavior of a potential addressee (customers). Users often read online product reviews to get either general or specific information about a product or service. Besides, companies analyze customer reviews to improve their product quality or to adjust their marketing strategy. However, many reviews are unstructured and long. With the number of product reviews growing rapidly, reading a large number of reviews becomes a time-consuming process for both users and companies. Therefore, review summarization becomes a serious issue. In this paper, we propose a new approach to summarizing reviews of electronics and household appliances. The proposed approach makes it possible to structure information for every aspect category; it provides calculation sentiment score for each aspect category, and shows the most relevant sentences for each aspect. We used product reviews from Yandex.Market as target data. Our task was performed in five main phases: 1) expert identification of thematic aspect categories; 2) classifying sentences into the predefined aspect categories; 3) sentence classification into two classes—positive and negative—with calculating the number of both type sentences within each aspect category; 4) sentence ranking; 5) visualization of the results obtained in the previous phases. The quality of the algorithm for creating a resume from a large collection of reviews has been tested on five models of products from the following categories: coffee machines, robot vacuum cleaners, e-books, TV-sets, and washing machines.

Sexual desire is one of the fundamental components of human personality and is seen as an important research object in contemporary Humanities. Its relevance for Linguistics lies in the increasing interest in the verbal representation of various forms of subjective experience, as well as in a large-scale discursivization of sexuality in contemporary culture and the need for developing a highly promising line of research known as ‘Language and Sexuality’. The present research focuses on metaphor with the aim of proving that it is an efficient mechanism of objectifying, structuring, interpreting, and verbalizing the subjective experience of sexual desire. The research is carried out on the basis of three thematically relevant novels by the contemporary American writer André Aciman (“Call Me by Your Name”, “Enigma Variations”, and “Find Me”). It is based on a sample of 364 contexts. Methodologically the research rests upon the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which facilitates the analysis of the ways fragments of subjective experience are comprehended and provides systematicity in the study of this phenomenon. The specific methodological instruments employed in this research include: the career of metaphor theory, which substantiates the inclusion of similes in metaphor analysis; the metaphoric landscape theory, which enables us to systematize metaphors by identifying central and peripheral elements and defining their conceptual load; the metaphorical creativity theory, which proves the possibility of metaphorical innovations both at the conceptual and verbal levels. The paper identifies and analyzes ten groups of metaphors, nine of which regularly occur in Aciman’s prose and one of which is made up of unique isolated forms. It has been shown that contrary to the popular belief that sexuality discourse is dominated by the fire metaphor, the central element of the metaphoric landscape of sexual desire in Aciman’s texts turned out to be sexual desire is movement in space. Among the most creative and regularly occurring ones are the metaphors sexual desire is a financial transaction and sexual desire is music. Within each of the identified groups the paper pinpoints the properties of the source domain that are being profiled, analyzes ways of their verbal representation, and discusses the possibility of conceptual and verbal variation. The research is qualitative and does not presuppose a statistical analysis of the metaphors.

The interpretation of the universal hand gestures of spreading arms and clapping hands in a written literary text is considered using the kinesiological approach to non-verbal communication of participants while speaking, which is currently widely developed. This approach makes it possible to identify the structuring role of the human body in the implementation of gestures based on the biomechanics of individual body parts involved in the process of gesticulation. For movement analysis researchers of French Sign Language designed a real-time 3D gesture visualization tool named ThirdEye to help study the importance of movement in the production of meaning within the context of sign language. Some studies support the idea that research on gestures accompanying speech can provide ways of studying speakers’ conceptualization of grammatical notions as they are speaking. So, the research on co-verbal gestures in French shows that gestures marking a boundary are predominantly associated with the Passé composé (perfect tense) whereas the gestures without boundaries are more often associated with the Imparfait (indefinite tense).

As to literary text, it has been proved that the material embodiment of a gesture will obviously differ in each individual case, taking into account the author’s commentary, which gives an ambiguous expressive and evaluative characteristic of the action being performed. The importance of reliance on the extralinguistic context is emphasized, which increases significantly in the situation of translating a text that interprets the body language of the “third” culture representatives who are not native speakers of the source or the target languages. Given the lack of a visual representation illustrating a specific gesture, the interpretation of the relevant fragments of the text requires an extensive cognitive baggage and a developed creative imagination of the translator.

The present article looks at how the translator’s creativity can adequately reconcile with the objective necessity for him/ her to follow the letter of the original. The case study of the Russian version of M. Atwood’s 1984 dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, the latter literally bristling with metaphor and simile, demonstrates a great importance of adequately conveying the text’s poetic function.

In our approach, inspired by G. Bachelard’s phenomenological theory of space, we view Offred’s monologue as a kind of revery, herself – as a day-dreaming subject going through an emotional ordeal. It should be noted that in modern psychology, Offred’s revery, including her memories and fantasies, can be regarded as a product of the “wanderings” of her mind. To look deeper into Offred’s subconscious and bring out her most personal emotions we apply cognitive linguistic tools. We also turn to Atwood’s early poetry since the “Tale” told by Offred the Handmaid manifests evocative images and motives typical of the peculiar Atwoodian style.

Specifically, we have focused on contexts, in which nature-inspired images produced by the protagonist’s “wandering mind” and unfolding within innumerable metaphors and similes, unveil the ambiguity of human nature and the eerie side of life in the fictional Republic of Gilead. The cognitive analysis of the original contexts has demonstrated the equal value of metaphor and simile as major literary devices for creating character profile and even for constructing a complex plot. We have studied how those extremely diverse figures of speech are conveyed by the translator, Anastasia B. Gryzunova. Despite the many occasions when she succeeded in conveying the meaning of Atwood’s unconventional comparisons, her version, however, lacks a clear-cut translation strategy which results in a dissonance between Offred’s deep depression and the way the translator actually makes her sound in some parts of the text.

Acknowledging the positive role of the translator’s creativity, we emphasize the need for translation adequacy interpreted as consistency in pursuing a strategy that builds on the key ideas of the source text, the author’s intention and her individual style. Such view on the nature of adequacy is in line with scientifically based evaluation methods for poetic prose, of which Atwood’s acclaimed dystopian novel is no doubt a remarkable example.

The article dwells on mixed martial arts discourse which is interpreted as a type of martial discourse dealing with sports communication and having an entertaining quality, thus allowing us to speak of a hybrid discourse. The methodology of this research includes descriptive and analytical methods. The linguostylistic and contextual types of analysis alongside with the quantitative method have been applied. The most common key concepts related to interactive communication have been singled out: ‘game’, ‘fun’, ‘show’, ‘entertainment’, ‘performance’, ‘pleasure’, etc. All of them play an important role in mixed martial arts discourse and manifest themselves in its lexis. We have also found that one of the most important tropes used in sports communication is the metaphor. In mixed martial arts discourse, many metaphorical models are actualized. The main one is the military metaphor. This is accounted for by profound kinship between mixed martial arts, the battle, the fight and the war. In our material, a zoomorphic metaphor is the second most frequent one. Reference to the animal world is underpinned by drawing a parallel between animal and human aggression. A professional mixed martial artist has to be dangerous and belligerent. Hence, the metaphorical likening of them to the hunter and to some extent to someone disturbing public order or even breaking the law, that is what our analysis shows. It was also found that a mixed martial arts champion is often portrayed as the king (or the queen as the case may be).