The sub-modi ‘competence’, ‘readiness’, ‘permission’, ‘ability’, ‘manageability’ including the modus of ‘possibility’, each having its marker and specific conditions of realization have been identified in the language of the diary by T. L. Sukhotina-Tolstaya. The study is made on the basis of lexical meaning of the modal modifiers, their functional context and pragmatics of utterance. The sub-modus ‘permission’ has the greatest lexical representation: its markers include the lexemes мочь , можно , возможно (be able, can, may). The sub-modus of ‘readiness’ is realized by lexemes готов (be ready) and в состоянии (be able). The ‘competence’, ‘ability’, and ‘manageability’ are represented by single modifiers, namely мочь , готов , уметь , успевать (be able, be ready, be competent, to manage) . At the bottom of the sub-modi objectification there are conditions which can be correlated either with the characteristics of the propositional qualities of the subject (the inner ones) or with the outer ones which do not depend on the subject. Functioning of the sub-modi ‘competence’, ‘readiness’, and ‘ability’ is defined by their inner conditions. The sub-modus ‘permission’ is realized both by means of inner and outer conditions. Some of them are relevant for the realization of a few sub-modi, others are compatible only with a single one. Considerable predominance of negative modifiers in the modus of ‘possibility’ and coincidence of the modal and propositional subjects are referred to specific features of «The Diary» as a special literary genre, and to one of the aspects of T. L. Sukhotina-Tolstaya’s idiostyle: the diary notes were being made during all her life, she used to write frankly «about herself and for herself».

The article is based on observations made while working on Academic German-Russian dictionary. Modern dictionaries are mostly based on the earlier publication, so a substantial part of the work on updating the dictionary is to overcome its inertia. Search engines and technology of corpus linguistics allow lexicographers to evaluate the relevance of the numerous mosaic changes in language usage. The study deals with specific mechanisms for updating all sections of dictionary entries. An example of lexicographic processing of neologisms, described in the paper, shows the principles of including new lemmas into academic bilingual dictionaries. It is emphasized that the actual frequency is not yet a sufficient basis for the lexicographic fixation of a «trendy» word in the academic dictionary. New words have to demonstrate stable frequency of use during several years. The principles of dictionary fixing of changes in the semantic structure of a word are discussed in detail. For example, the extension of the semantics of the noun «der Nazi» demonstrates the complexity of the search for a translation equivalent with communicative and functional equivalence. Special attention is paid to the necessity of fixing new meanings in the bilingual dictionary, if they were not reflected in the explanatory dictionaries. Based on the concept of lexicographical equivalence, the authors show how to update the translation part of the dictionary entry.

The paper discusses the results of the comparative experiment with two groups of participants - the first-year and fourth-year language students. The participants were asked to give the definitions to some linguistic terms in order to reveal the influence of the scientific and everyday worldviews on the terms meaning in the students mind. Twelve terms were selected for the experiment, some of which are largely used in everyday language, others were learnt at secondary or high school or discovered only in University course books. The analysis of the experimental data allows us to consider the everyday and scientific worldviews as components of the words’ semantics and to study them from the language consciousness perspective. The conclusion was made that the everyday and scientific worldviews don’t exist in the consciousness separately from each other, they go together and influence each other in different ways in a variety of situations. The analysis of the collected definitions shows that the knowledge behind the terms changes in its quantity and quality, but it doesn’t move instantly from the everyday to the scientific worldview.

In the article attitudes to eternity in Russian and Japanese linguocultures are traced on the basis of associations experiments. The worldview of Russians of the early 1990s, as well as of Russians and the Japanese of the early 21^st century, is under consideration. A series of free association experiments has been carried out to analyse the language consciousness of Russians and the Japanese respectively. Relevant association fields and their semantic components have been examined and juxtaposed. A conclusion is made that Russians and the Japanese share generally basic human values, with some minor cultural differences which result in nation-specific peculiarities of the image of eternity in their language consciousness. Both Russians and the Japanese associate eternity with the ideas of infiniteness, life and immortality. The experimental resources available show that Russians tend to associate the image of eternity with astronomy, while the Japanese more often refer it to philosophical categories. Semantically, the notion of eternity is broader in Japanese than in Russian. For this reason the Japanese, unlike Russians, emphasised the meaning of constancy in their reactions. Discrepancies in interpreting the image of time have also been discovered when comparing the association reactions of the two Russian samplings; these testify to the influence of social and economic factors on the worldview of a person representing a certain linguoculture. The hardships of the turbulent 1990s resulted in Russians` loosing their value orientation. They regained their confidence and recovered their ability to analyse phenomena judiciously only with the establishment of relative stability in the 2000s. In particular, it is only in the later Russian sampling that one can find the reactions “always” and “forever” that signify the eternity of time. In all instances, the representatives of all samplings perceive eternity as everlasting and boundless, thus manifesting their natural attitude to this phenomenon.

This article deals with the problem of the categorization of the emotion of joy in the fiction of I. A. Bunin. To identify in selected Bunin’s artworks the words, semantically related to this emotion, we used computer analytical tools based on the resources of the Laboratory of Computer Lexicology and Lexicography of the Philological Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. To obtain a concordance for the considered Bunin’s texts, a list of words-emotions that convey the meaning of 'joy' was identified according to the classification of emotive vocabulary proposed by L. G. Babenko. On the basis of this sample the frequencies of the words that transmit the values of these tokens in the contexts was obtained. Relying on the results of computer analysis, we established which categories the author uses to convey the emotion of joy; also some cognitive models of the concept of joy in the analyzed Bunin’s stories were constructed. The author of this article came to the following conclusions: 1) in the analyzed Bunin stories the concept JOY is transmitted not only through direct nomination, but also with the help of connotative values of derived units that are "hidden" behind a certain linguistic form; 2) for a bearer of culture, different from Russian, it is very difficult to understand and interpret the emotions that are transmitted in Russian literary texts. In this case, the computer analysis of linguistic data can provide a bearer of a different culture with scientific principles that will be helpful when analyzing and understanding the semantics of words conveying emotions; 3) the obtained results are relevant for linguocognitive, linguistic, and textual studies.

The article dwells on the way the language play functions within the framework of the political communication. The specific cases of the language play are analyzed predominantly on the basis of the American political discourse. As a result, the conclusion is reached that such an important or dominant traits of politics as competitiveness and the manipulatory tonality are linked to the language play, and the phenomenon seems to be of the universal nature. It allows the speaker to ignore some norms of the institutional communication and to demonstrate linguistic creativity and inventiveness. It permits to achieve a certain level of ambiguity and polysemy of the discursive meanings. The main functions of the language play are face-saving and face-harming. Trying to save his face and using for this purpose the language play, politicians may demonstrate their wit, toughness, smartness, alertness, etc. On the other hand, one may emphasize the weaknesses of the opponent, but formally remain within the law and elude pursuit since in case of any allegations one may claim misunderstanding and/or misinterpretation. It is this effect of the language play that contributes to the manipulatory tonality of the political communication.

Despite the numerous statements about the cultural backwardness of Slavic people (and Russians in particular) compared to their Western contemporaries, which are still voiced by both foreign and domestic scholars, the extant documents of the ninth and tenth centuries (translators’ prefaces being the most interesting case) show that at this early stage of Slavic Christianity the worldview and «cultural literacy» of those Slavs who carried out early translations were very close to those of their Western European counterparts. The prefaces to literary works and translations completed among Germanic (Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon) and Slavic people in the ninth century demonstrate similar concerns of their authors (translators) and similar approaches to addressing these issues. The alleged author of the Macedonian Cyrillic Folio (MCF) (Cyril Constantine), his younger contemporary Constantine of Preslav, Otfrid von Weissenburg and King Alfred in their prefaces (both prosaic and poetic) assert the necessity to translate into or compose religious texts in vernacular and place their work in a wider cultural context. In order to achieve this they refer to previous or contemporary missionary projects (Otfrid), existing translations of sacred texts (King Alfred) or religious authorities that seem to have endorsed vernacular translations of certain, if not all, religious messages (MCF). The latter also contains references (sometimes preserved in the text itself, sometimes reconstructed by researchers) to St. Paul, his alleged disciple (Pseudo)-Dionysius the Areopagite and Cyril of Alexandria. In this way the translators appropriate the cultural and symbolic capital associated with these texts and figures, whose Christian history was in some cases as old as Christianity itself. The prefacesэ’ authors also give more or less detailed descriptions of the procedure (Otfrid) and/or formulate the principles of their translation (MCL, King Alfred) and specify particular problems, for example, dealing with the difference in grammatical gender between a Greek or Latin noun and their Slavic or Teutonic equivalents, which might have been important in biblical discourse where words had both direct and symbolic meanings and referents. The prefaces also contain traditional topoi of this type of paratext, such as captatio benevolentiae and humility topos, as well as some reflections upon the moral and ethical significance of their enterprise. The prefaces reveal the formation of national identities and even the nascent national pride of Slavic and Germanic peoples.

The purpose of the study is to analyze four French titles of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility translated by Isabelle de Montolieu (1815), Jules Castier (1948), Jean Privat (1979), Pierre Goubert (2000). The analysis of the title translation is carried out comparing the meanings of its lexemes (interpreting the key elements: sense, sensibility) in English and French dictionaries of the 18^th-19^th centuries (specifically for Jane Austen’s original and de Montolieu’s version), modern English and French dictionaries, and associative databases of modern language usage. The method of reconstruction of associative fields is used to reveal general thematic categories, which include the most frequent associations (the core of associative fields). The analysis is based on the data of French associative dictionary DAF (Institute of Linguistics, RAS in cooperation with NSU). The conclusion emphasizes that the French title Le Coeur et La Raison (by J. Castier and P. Goubert) is the most relevant one among the French translations. The analysis is a part of a larger research based on studying the full-text versions of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility done by French and Russian translators.

The paper features the poems recited by Alice in L. Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , with a focus on their translations into Russian done between 1908 and 1913 in Saint Petersburg. A special attention is given to the attempts to keep in the translations the features of grotesque and parody. The paper argues that during the formation of poetic translation in Russia in the early 20^th century Carroll’s poems from the book were rendered with the relevant elements of grotesque or parody, or combining both. The comparison of the translations and identifying relevant features of the poems promoted to the conclusion that adding grotesque features to the parody in the form of a better known poem in the target language got a wider use among translators. However, this approach caused the omission of some relevant elements of the source text. Overall, the poems in the book in the early 20^th century editions played a significant part in shaping more consistent translation solutions to render Carroll’s book into Russian.