The article dwells on linguo-social aspects of the early 20^th century discourse, primarily as they are shown in B. Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’, written in 1912 and steeped in the atmosphere of the England of that time. The definition of the term ‘discourse’ is given in accordance with M. Foucault’s theory. It is pointed out that any discourse is inextricably linked with historical factors of its origination as well as the ideology and – in a broader sense – the worldview of people living in a concrete historical epoch. General scientific methods of observation, interpretation and induction have been used. Linguistic methods including linguo-pragmatic and linguo-stylistic approaches to discourse have also been applied. The method of critical discourse analysis makes it possible to emphasize the importance and dynamism of discursive linguo-social aspects. It has been found that the plot of the play is mainly built by the heroes’ exchange on a number of trivial problems. On the other hand, it has philosophical and in particular linguo-philosophical issues that make up the core of the book. As a result, the author sheds some light on his contemporaries’ attitude to language (languages) as well as to certain social groups distinguished – among other criteria – from the point of view of their members’ fluency in received/standard English. The hybrid character of B. Shaw’s literary discourse is highlighted. It has been shown that, within the analyzed discourse framework, everyday and mundane philosophical discursive practices play a prominent role. The latter can be conducive to the spread of (linguo-social) prejudices but at the same time it is not uncommon for them to serve as a basis for an alternative discourse.

The article presents a lexical and semantic analysis of the toponymy of the Erzya Bagana village in Shentalinsky district of the Samara region. The obtained results are compared with the materials of the author’s research in other villages of the Mordva of Shentalinsky district, in the Erzya settlements of the Samara Volga region, as well as with the data on the Erzya dialects of other territories of the settlement of the Mordva-Erzya. The Shentala ethnoterritorial group of Mordvins includes the Erzya population of the villages of Bagana, Staroe Surkino, Novoe Surkino, Vasilevka, Senkino. The toponymy of the Bagana village and its environs has not yet been subjected to a comprehensive study, at the same time, such work should be intensified, since modern demographic processes contribute to the rapid disappearance of microtoponymy of rural settlements. To carry out a lexical and semantic analysis of the Bagana toponymy in order to identify its characteristic features and, at the same time, common features with the Erzya toponymy of other territories. The research materials were collected in the Bagana village during the 2021 field season with the help of G.M. Kert’s questionnaire developed specifically for the Finno-Ugric languages. When working on the collected material, lexico-semantic and comparative types of analysis were used. As a result of the conducted research, 31 toponymic units and a cluster of geographical vocabulary of the Bagana dialect of the Erzya-Mordovian language were introduced into scientific circulation, the main characteristics of the toponymic space of Bagana were revealed, which allowed for its comparative analysis with other Erzya toponymic spaces. The toponymic space under study reflects both the peculiarities of the Bagana dialect and the features of nomination and semantics of geographical names characteristic of the Shentala Mordva. In general, this toponymic space reveals common features with the toponymy that we find in villages with a significant proportion of the Erzya population in the Samara Volga region at the present stage: most names come from the Erzya and Russian languages, hybrid Erzya-Russian and Russian-Erzya names are also found in the toponymy, the main markers of the Erzya toponymic area are: the dual urban system of Alo pe – Vere pe, the formula of toponyms typical of Mordvins is “definable + appellative”.

   The paper analyzes and describes the lexico-semantic groups (further, LSG) “Horse harness” in Yakut in comparison to Khalkha-Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk.

   The purpose of the study is to introduce horse harness naming in academic use in the comparative and comparative-historical aspects.

   Material from the Mongolic languages was used to compare and identify common terms and establish their Turkic and Mongolian stems. The material of the study was selected from the corresponding dictionaries; it also includes field records collected from informants during expeditions to Mongolia and Buryatia. The main methods are descriptive, comparative, comparative-historical, and that of continuous sampling. The analysis allowed us to determine the structure and semantics of the considered lexical units, to identify a significant number of similarities and differences in Yakut and Mongolic languages. The Yakut, Khalkha-Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk material showed both Turkic-Mongolic and Turkic layers common for the analyzed languages. At the same time, for Yakut the Russian layer was revealed. The analyzed material allows us to speak about the features of the Yakut language that distinguish it from other Turkic languages, and Buryat from all Mongolic languages, as well as about what brings the Yakut language closer to Buryat. Out of the 38 lexical units of the LSG «Horse Harness» in modern Yakut, the comparative analysis has revealed 9 units representing Mongolian parallels, most of which presumably penetrated from the Old Mongolian language in the pre-literate period. Interestingly, the phonetic structure of some of them makes it possible to attribute them to the earliest Yakut-Mongolian contacts.

The article is based on the material of one of the Germanic languages represented in Siberia, known in the world as Plautdietsch or the Low German language (dialect) of the Mennonites. One of the striking features of the Plautdietsch consonant system is considered – the variation of the k’/t’ sound types in certain positions in the word, primarily in combination with the vowels of the front row (k’int / t’int ‘child’, k’oak’ / t’oat’ ‘church’), as well as in some consonant combinations (for example, drin’k’ә / drin’t’ә to ‘drink’, ma:lk’ / ma:lt’ ‘milk’). The use of k’ or t’, respectively, was considered by some researchers to be the markers of two dialects within the Mennonite language: k’ – Chortiza and t’ – Molotscha. From a diachronic point of view, these sounds go back to the common German k; they appeared as a result of the so-called Frisian palatalization. Archival dialectological material confirms the use of these two sounds in the Mennonite colonies of southern Russia at the beginning of the last century.

In the settlements of Siberia, where there are a large number of Plautdietsch speakers, according to our observations, the forms with t’ were used according to the Molochna type (t’oat’ ‘church’, t’int ‘child’, veat’ ‘week’).

A new impetus to the exploration of this alternation was given by the material collected during the last linguistic expedition to the village of Apollonovka in the Omsk region, where a large isolated community of Plautdietsch speakers is located. In the speech of the inhabitants of this village, the use of t’ (Molochna type) prevails in all these positions, however, the forms on k’ used by some carriers were also recorded (so, you can hear ma:lk’ / ma:lt’ ‘milk’, k’in’a / t’in’a ‘children’ and so on). At the same time, both forms are recognized by the informants as correct.

The assumption is made that these sound types cannot be regarded as consonants marking different dialects, but rather as optional variants.

A sound was also recorded that was not mentioned in the studies earlier (s’t’), which appears in preposition to sonorants, especially before -l: k’lɔid / t’lɔid / s’t’lɔid ‘dress’. The consonant under consideration can be tentatively designated as a soft medial-occlusive spirant. Most likely, its appearance represents the third stage of mitigation in the considered alternation according to the scheme k > k’ > t’ > s’t’.

The observations presented in the article, based on the analysis of actual field material, can be the beginning of further study of the variability of the Mennonite language in Siberia.

   Modality is a complex grammatical and functional-semantic category which is reflected in various types of discourse. The relevance of studying epistemic modality, reflecting the author’s knowledge of the reported information and his/her attitude to it from the point of view of its reliability, is determined by the necessity to analyze the linguistic features of its expression in a scientific text.

   The aim of the paper is to study morphological, lexical-syntactical and lexical means of expressing modality and to identify their pragmatic functions in English-language texts concerned with engineering.

   The study of the linguistic component in a scientific text will help foreign researchers present their scientific works in accordance with the authentic features of English. This determines the theoretical significance of studying the author’s means of expressing epistemic modality as a method for reasoning their scientific propositions, interacting with the target reader and expressing academic responsibility. The study of theoretical works by foreign and Russian scientists has shown that epistemic modality of a scientific text implements mainly the properties of the author’s subjective approach. However, unlike other types of discourse, the modality of a scientific text identifies a certain degree of objectivity in the author’s approach since it is characterized by the assessment of the reported information in terms of its reliability/unreliability. The given study assumes that the category of modality of any text, including a scientific one, is difficult to analyze statistically. It is known that the expression of the English text modality is characterized by imperceptible “transitions” between different levels of its implementation. Therefore, the paper considers some linguistic means at the morphological, lexical-syntactical and lexical levels. They include the verbal category of the imperative, subjunctive and presumptive types of mood, infinitive constructions, modal verbs and modal words of various parts of speech with the seme “expectation/assumption”. The article underlines an additional pragmatic aspect of modality means in an English-language scientific text concerned with the need for soft persuasion of the professional community to accept the information presented.

   The present paper summarizes the available theoretical and empirical data of medical communication scientific research in the addresser-addressee aspect in Russian and foreign works. The information on the study of the psycholinguistic aspect of communication between the medical staff and the patient is systematized not only taking into account differences in the provision of medical services in Russia and abroad, but also depending on the age of communicants, the chosen communication strategies and the conditions of speakers’ effective interaction. The paper shows the scarcity of works dealing with the study of communication between a doctor and a child. The paper also considers some psychological aspects of child/adolescent communication with an adult, which is very important in doctors’ professional activity. It is pointed out that research on communication between a doctor and a parent/a legal representative of a minor patient is relevant, but also scarce. Foreign research is centered on communication of nurses and the patients/their relatives, as well as of patients with loss of voice. Russian scientists’ works, carried out on the basis of the communication analysis between the adult patient and the doctor, can be roughly divided into three types: 1) studies dealing with the strategies of the communicants. These are both communication strategies, conditioned by professional tasks of a doctor, and speech strategies implementing them; 2) works studying verbal, non-verbal and paraverbal means of communication between a doctor and a patient; 3) research describing and comparing effective communication conditions between a doctor and a patient. This study is grounded on the theoretical and methodological basis of psycholinguistics and takes into account the stipulations of communication theory. The methods of analysis, synthesis and systematization have been used to achieve the goal. The analysis and grouping of data confirmed the presence of theoretical and methodological flaws in the study of professional communication between a doctor and other participants of medical communication. The works revealed an unintentional blending of the concepts “professional communicative strategy” and “speech strategy”. The analysis of linguistic means that implement speech strategy tactics in medical communication is important for linguistic research in the future.

   This paper presents the analysis of inter-annotator disagreements in modeling argumentation in scientific papers. The aim of the study is to specify annotation guidelines for the typical disagreement cases. The analysis focuses on inter-annotator disagreements at three annotation levels: theses identification, links construction between theses, specification of reasoning models for these links. The dataset contains 20 argumentation annotations for 10 scientific papers from two thematic areas, where two experts have independently annotated each text. These 20 annotations include 917 theses and 773 arguments. The annotation of each text has consisted in modelling its argumentation structure in accordance with Argument Interchange Format. The use of this model results in construction of an oriented graph with two node types (information nodes for statements, scheme nodes for links between them and reasoning models in these links) for an annotated text. Identification of reasoning models follows Walton’s classification. To identify disagreements between annotators, we perform an automatic comparison of graphs that represent an argumentation structure of the same text. This comparison includes three stages: 1) identification of theses that are present in one graph and absent in another; 2) detection of links that connect the corresponding theses between graphs in a different manner; 3) identification of different reasoning models specified for the same links. Next, an expert analysis of the automatically identified discrepancies enables specification of the typical disagreement cases based on the structural properties of argumentation graphs (positioning of theses, configuration of links across statements at different distances in the text, the ratio between the overall frequency of a reasoning model in annotations and the frequency of disagreements over its identification). The study shows that the correspondence values between argumentation graphs reach on average 78 % for theses, 55 % for links, 60 % for reasoning models. Typical disagreement cases include 1) detection of theses expressed in a text without explicit justification; 2) construction of links between theses in the same paragraph or at a distance of four and more paragraphs; 3) identification of two specific reasoning models (connected respectively to the 40 % and 33 % of disagreements); 4) confusion over functionally different schemes due to the perception of links by annotators in different aspects. The study results in formulating annotation guidelines for minimizing typical disagreement cases at each level of argumentation structures.

   A whole range of topical scientific issues is associated with the concept of obsolete vocabulary: criteria for selecting obsolete vocabulary, the concept of archaism, the distinction between artificial and natural archaization, the problem of mixing obsolete vocabulary with words of poetic and bookish styles.

   The purpose of this work is to compare and classify Russian translations of «The Song of Roland» in terms of various types of obsolete vocabulary occurring in them, to quantify the frequency of the latter and interpret these facts with regard to translation strategies.

   For our study we used some fragments of Russian translations corresponding to the LII-LVI laisses in F. Michel’s version of the poem, published in 1837. In our article, we use the term obsolete vocabulary in relation to archaisms and historicisms. When describing archaisms, we were guided by P. Zumthor’s classification . Our selection of obsolete vocabulary was based on the presence of corresponding marks in the following dictionaries: S. I. Ozhegov 1986, D. N. Ushakov 1935 - 1940, the Small Academic Dictionary of 1999. The largest number of obsolete words was found in B. I. Yarkho’s translation – 58 instances. Next comes the translation of the count F. de La Barthes – 54 instances. Then follows B. N. Almazov’s translation – 53 obsolete lexical units and Yu. B. Korneev’s translation – 51. The smallest number of obsolete words was found in A. N. Chudinov’s translation – 43 examples. Historicisms (116 units) turned out to be the most frequent in translations, slightly less frequent are lexical archaisms (95 units), next in frequency are grammatical archaisms (21 units), then come phonetical-graphic archaisms (19 units), syntactic archaisms (5 units) and syntagmatic ones (3 units). In addition, the ratio of archaisms and historicisms is not directly related to the time of creation of the translation, nor is it directly related to the frequency of obsolete vocabulary in general. This suggests that translation decisions are determined by the authors’ personal choice rather than by external factors.

The purpose of the review article is to identify conceptualizations of the post-truth era in the English-language socio-political communication, based on the key vocabulary of a number of reviews and sources representing the component post-truth in the media. The object of the analysis is lexical representation of the component post-truth in the media. The subject matter of the analysis is conceptual interpretation of the post-truth component in such relevant phrases as post-truth era (or politics, world of politics, politicians, society, age, knowledge and power, condition, campaign, etc.) in various authorial sources. The Russian equivalents of truth in the item post-truth are reliability (достоверность), accuracy (точность), credibility (доверие); in the media the phrase post-truth comes to mean ‘to abandon or neglect the principles of objectivity and reliability’. It has been shown that in the USA and UK socio-political field expert assessments and interpretations of the claim itself are contradictory and are often marked with skepticism. It is clear, however, that it cannot be taken literally and that in science and education discourse, with the exception of history, it manifests itself differently: in close relation to scientific rational truths or facts, but not to daily factual truths described by H. Arendt. Also, specific sets of key words are used to describe manifestations of post-truth in the media and science. “Fake news” and election campaigns don’t seem to be the major features of the post-truther media. Instead, the concepts bullshit by H. Frankfurt and post-truth game by S. Fuller are competing for this role; however, they can’t be regarded as elaborated formal rhetorical schema either. Yu.Shatin alone made a pertinent and significant attempt to describe the new post-truther rhetoric. The specialist literature review shows that the media post-truth discourse is actually a manifestation of a deep crisis in the ‘canonical’ democracy, a reflection of its agonal state in the American-British vocabulary and narratives. The paper emphasizes that this kind of discourse has not only a home dimension, but also a foreign policy one and, consequently, internal and external addressing. Its reception in Russia is distorted due to remoteness of observers, which does not allow them to see how fakes and the new post-truth vocabulary are actually interpreted by the agents in the process of intra- or intercultural confrontation.

   The paper analyzes the concept LABOR in the Russian worldview on the basis of 1980-2000 publicist contexts. The source of the material is the journalistic subcorpus of the “National Corpus of the Russian Language”. The main cognitive features of the concept LABOR are identified by analyzing semantics, pragmatics and contextual partners of the key lexemes representing the concept. The analysis of 500 publicist contexts has shown that the concept LABOR in publicist discourse possesses a variety of cognitive features, which indicates a multi-level structure of the concept. We distinguish three types of these features: anti-ideological, ontological (of objective and subjective nature), and social. All the three are due to the external historical changes, are relatively unstable and “responsible” for the structural changes of the concept. The analysis concludes that the Soviet regime and the historical situation had a significant impact on the language consciousness and mentality of native speakers at the conceptual and value levels. In the structure of the concept LABOR, the main changes are associated with the following components: subject, object, characteristics of labor, result, process, and addressee of labor. The most significant changes related to deideologization affected the blocks of ideas about the subject and addressee of labor (destruction of the idea about collective labor for the benefit of the country).

   The paper discusses methodological issues of student language consciousness research. The analysis of publications dealing with the language consciousness of a student leads us to the formulation of the main methodological principles. These are: the choice of linguistic signs (stimuli) relevant for the main respondents’ activity and adequate to it and a relevant method of processing collected empirical data (in order) to reflect (or to detect) features of one’s main regular activities, representing their individual personal evaluative assessments of the activity under study and to minimize the part of misleading odd casual reactions from respondents. The general conclusion of the study is as follows: in the students’ language consciousness images of the academic setting, its objects and phenomena are always refracted by their personal perceptions of these phenomena.