THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS
The communicative features of academic discourse have been explored from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly carried out on English-language material. Little is known of how rhetorical elements, including stancetaking markers, are used in Russian academic prose. The сurrent study assumed that in order to ensure effective communication academic writers use a repertoire of stancetaking features. The theoretical basis of the study is Hyland’s model of stance markers which is frequently used in studying interactional strategies found in academic discourse. As research material the articles by Russian engineering scholars derived from six academic journals were used. The analysis revealed a large number of stance items with a predominance of boosters in the article introductions selected to build the corpus. It is suggested that the differences in the employment of stance markers identified in the study reflect discipline-specific writing peculiarities of the engineering academic community, while the discursive choices made by engineering writers are constrained by discursive conventions and depend on the level of the writers’ language proficiency. Despite some data limitations, the research results can be seen as a starting point for the future research of stancetaking in Russian research articles from different perspectives.
The article provides a comprehensive analysis of linguistic means that serve to express the future meaning in English. The material for the study was the direct speech of a novel written by a British author, from which 1,695 examples containing predicative grammatical and lexico-grammatical units with the future meaning were extracted by continuous sampling. The study of the extracted language units was carried out using componential, distributive, contextual and quantitative analyses. The results of the study revealed a significant repertoire of linguistic means, expressing the future meaning with varying degrees of discreteness. Among the grammatical forms of the indicative mood, Future Indefinite and Present Indefinite were the most frequent; among the forms of the subjunctive mood, the form would + infinitive was in the lead. The imperative mood showed a very high frequency, being the most common grammatical means in the contexts of the future meaning. Of the lexico-grammatical means (represented by biverbal constructions), be going to + infinitive and can + infinitive were quite frequent. The Continuous and Perfect forms turned out to be much less common. It was also found that when used in contexts of the future meaning, the grammatical Continuous forms partially lose the semantics of duration, and the Perfect forms partially lose the semantics of completeness, which leads to a certain neutralization of their aspectual characteristics. Grammatical forms with the primary future meaning tended to be used as absolute tenses, while forms with the secondary future meaning — such as Present Indefinite, Present Perfect, Past Subjunctive — tended to express relative temporal semantics in dependent predication.
This article considers political posters as multimodal texts containing interdiscursive elements which produce linguistic and pictorial creative patterns. The aim of the research is to reveal the way interdiscursive resources work in political posters on the basis of intersemiosis to expressively shape politically relevant information and to impact the recipients emotionally. The sample includes modern British and American political posters with interdiscursive elements which were intentionally embedded into political still visuals to create new layers of meaning. The purpose of this carefully designed discursive hybridization is to attract the recipients’ attention and, in the long run, to affect their electoral choices. The research is set in the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, it also employs stylistic, structural and semantic types of analysis. The examination reveals the sources of interdiscursive items that encompass sport, cinematic, virtual and art discourses. It also elucidates the way interdiscursive elements are integrated into a multimodal text of a political poster on verbal and non-verbal levels. The article contains a case study of a poster based on the combination of political, advertising and cinematic discourses. The analysis shows how the interaction of discourses generates multimodal creativity and how intersemiosis stimulates a careful orchestration of semiotically divergent elements of the target and donor discourses, which ultimately conveys a powerful message. The study is novel as it specifies the notions of multimodal creativity and intersemiosis in reference to political still visuals. The methodology employed in this research opens up new avenues in exploring interdiscursivity and multimodal creativity in other types of text used in visual political communication, such as editorial cartoons and memes.
Politicians and public figures seek to actively use verbal strategies and tactics in order to influence the views and values of the audience and, if necessary, transform its worldview. That is why, the impact of discourse always remains a relevant topic and is a promising and actively developing field in modern linguistics. It is widely known that the ways we think and talk about a subject or a fact influence and reflect the ways we act in relation to that subject. The discourse of power can have both a direct impact through direct speech acts (laws, orders, instructions), and an indirect one, i.e. it can convince the audience through arguments, examples and other rhetorical means that increase the possibility of speech impact. At present, state leaders, in their maintaining power, mostly appeal to public consciousness, in which case factual information loses its significance and content conceptual information becomes more important, revealing the speaker’s attitude towards realities of socio-economic and political life of the country. Within the framework of this paper, we have analyzed communicative strategies in public discourse of the Spanish monarch Felipe VI (from 2014 to 2022) aimed at his maintaining power. As a result of the analysis, we have revealed that, firstly, the interpretation strategy is a conventional resource in the King’s public discourse because of the need of the Spanish Crown to influence the way the internal and external audiences interpret events and facts. Secondly, the strategy of evoking an emotional mood is fundamental in the current context as it helps the monarch unite the Spanish society on common values and awaken their patriotic feelings. Thirdly, nowadays, due to the problems of modern Spain in general and the Crown in particular, the King’s speeches are more emotionally charged in order to demonstrate his empathy and desire to share his feelings and emotional experiences, which contributes to building a trusting relationship with the nation and creating a situation of mutual understanding.
The analysis is carried out against the background of conceptions of deontic meaning as a basic concept to analyze social evaluation of lexis. As first introduced by Fritz Hermanns, the term deontic meaning is considered as part of the lexical meaning of some words and expressions on par with their descriptive meaning that appeals to the stances of the recipients. The paper presumes that deontic meanings refer to the prescriptive usage of a linguistic form and its positive or negative deontics pointing to whether something may (not) or ought (not) to be used in certain contexts. In this framework the deontic meaning of the word is studied in the perspective of political correctness and politically correct language. The analysis shows an explanatory force of the concept deontic meaning as an analytical tool for investigating the social embeddedness of a linguistic form, and contributes to understanding linguistic processes generated by political correctness. This paper, first, reveals the key notions central to understanding political correctness as aiming to redress injustices in matters such as race, nation, gender, sexual orientation in the modern (Anglo)-American and German types of discourse. Second, the paper aims to discuss the relationship between denotative meaning, connotation and deontic meaning in explaining the meaning making process in contextualization. The analysis is in line with theoretical and methodological approaches in modern discourse linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatically oriented linguistics. Empirical material for the study is provided by the texts reflecting current socio-cultural situations in Western Europe and in the USA in 2019-2023. The actual cases show that in the politically correct naming practices there is a trend for the formation of a deontic meaning. In fact, what is observed is not an alternative nomination, but a reduction of the possible polysemy of meanings to one dominant interpretation and one meaning. The mechanism of the deontic meaning formation acts as socially determined. The analysis shows such situations in which political correctness actually has been transformed into a struggle with hidden meanings potentially derived by the addressee.
The article presents a detailed review of the studies by foreign authors on the subject of the neurophysiological substrate of abstract words. It analyses the main differences between abstract and concrete words, and the ways in which they are categorized. The article also investigates the notion of semantic association of abstract concepts. Semantic association, or associated words, are the words whose meanings are not synonymous, but which are often linked together in the real world or context. The study of memory representations that support the use of abstract knowledge in context shows significant deviation from the previous studies focusing on linguistic or other processing that occurs quickly and similarly for many different abstract concepts. Much attention is currently being paid to the research of the deeper, context-based processing of abstract words, which is central to understanding of human thought, reasoning, and decision-making processes. An extensive foreign research program over the past two decades has focused on the role of the brain’s modal sensory, motor, and affective systems in the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. The article considers the works by foreign authors who conducted their research based on neuroimaging methods, experiments in free reproduction, reproduction on command, pair-associated recognition, and laboratory studies. As the result, conclusions were drawn regarding clear criteria for distinguishing between abstract and concrete concepts.
COGNITIVE STUDIES AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
The article deals with the English Internet comments viewed as non-professional political discourse of everyday network communication. In these comments the videos on the legitimacy crisis in Libya in the early 2010s are discussed. Considering the array of commentary texts as a conceptual system, we study the non-professional political discourse related to the Libyan crisis in terms of frame analysis. Since the consequences of this crisis are felt in the world politics to this day, the users keep commenting on it regularly, it makes it possible to study the dynamics of the conceptual discursive structures. For the purpose we chose frames as mental models that allow us to study linguistic consciousness by dividing texts into fragments reflecting the accumulated knowledge and experience of a person about stereotypical situations. Frame modeling is carried out with the help of the FrameNet frame base. Variants of frame models constructed through the analysis of the network discursive material, are called network frames. The study of comments relating to different periods of time allows us to identify the dynamics of the changes in the structure and content of the key frames that describe the legitimacy crisis in Libya.
Modern linguistics pays more and more attention to the issues of political discourse as a communicative activity that attracts a large amount of public attention. Politicians’ campaign speeches, widely studied by public relations specialists, are an effective tool for promoting certain ideas during election campaigns and events. This approach is especially common in the United States of America where political figures running for a particular post often make monologue campaign speeches on the national television and/or directly in front of the voters. From a linguistic point of view, the question how various linguistic means of expressing an intentional orientation are implemented in pre-election campaign speeches of prominent US politicians seems to be a most interesting one. The purpose of this article is to consider the phenomenon of speech intention in the context of monological campaign speeches in the discourse of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as to identify intentional patterns in their public speech construction. The object of the study is the intentionality of the political figures’ speech behavior as the most important factor in their speech interaction with the audience. A selection of monologue speeches by politicians during the 2020 election campaigns were used as material for the study. One of our objectives is to identify the specificity of the use of intentional vocabulary, grammatical and stylistic means that contribute to the expression of the intentional component by the chosen US politicians in their campaign monologues. The author of the article believes that the intentionality of the American politicians’ speech behavior presupposes a pragmatic effect on the mass recipient. At the same time, the addressee, whether s/he is an ordinary voter or a linguist, must be able to decode the intentions of the addressor, realized by him/her through the intentional speech behavior.
The article defines the concept of the moon in the traditional Yakut world view at the levels of language, myth and ritual. It is common knowledge that the Yakuts are the northernmost Turks who have largely preserved the mental representations of the Southern Siberia Turks’ ethnocultural heritage. National world view features in the nominations of the concept moon related to space and time cultural paradigm, representing the mythopoetic picture of the world, have been established. The archaic features of this concept, set phrases, and oral folk art have been considered. The relevance of this research lies in the conceptualization of the verbal culture of the Sakha people. The purpose of the article is to identify linguistic and cultural features of the concept moon in the Yakut language world view. The article uses a cognitive approach, contextual and syntagmatic analysis of word connection as well as the method of conceptual analysis. The cosmological representation of the Universe among the Yakuts is given through the archaic metaphor of a leather vessel with numerical and spatial symbols. The moon is projected in conjunction with the sun as a trace of an early form of deity worship. It has an ambivalent function that affects the fate that generates birth/death. In connection with this understanding, various verbal and non-verbal ritual actions have arisen. The space and time paradigm in the oral tradition has given rise to various names for the calculus of time. In analyzing the nominative field of the concept moon, its universal and national components have been revealed. Among the lexical units that form the concept moon in the Sakha language, one can distinguish riddles that emphasize the roundness of its shape, symbolizing the cyclicity of life – the idea of eternal birth. It has such basic signs as large/pale/white/moving, the somatic code of which is manifested in the symbolic use of the eye. When comparing fairy tales, similar and distinctive motifs associated with the image of the girl on the moon have been revealed.
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
The novelty of the research is stipulated by the fact that at present no comprehensive psycholinguistic analysis of doctors’ communicative approach in relation to the subject, object, place of communication and the communicative event itself has been conducted. The issue of applying the associative experiment to explicate doctors’ communicative intentions has also remained beyond the scope of scientific research. This paper addresses the question of the relevance of key concepts’ associative fields representing a typical communicative situation in professional discourse to identify the communicative intentions of workers engaged in the doctor-patient relationship. The associative fields of key concepts conditioning the doctors’ communicative intentions in the field of pediatric cardiology have been studied in thorough detail. The associative experiment stimuli included: patient, doctor, cardiology, cardiac surgery department, congenital heart disease (CHD), surgery. These words and word combinations describe: 1) agents of medical communication (patient, doctor); 2) place of communication (cardiac surgery department); 3) subject area (cardiology); 4) subject of communication (CHD, surgery). The general sampling of the research comprised 300 associations to the proposed stimuli. As the study indicated, when modeling a typical communicative situation in cardiologist professional discourse important are: the persons involved (subject and object); qualities; tools / objects used in a communication situation; actions performed by communicants; as well as the evaluation of the communicative situation. Among other things, the presence of evaluative reactions (positive or negative) makes it possible to exclude the emotional burnout syndrome (emotional detachment) of the doctor which is characterized by muffled emotions, smoothing out the sharpness of feelings and experiences, and the absence of an emotional response. The basic method of this research is a chained association experiment with the registration of all associations of the respondents. The obtained data were interpreted with the help of Y. N. Karaulov’s semantic gestalt method. The hypothesis about the effectiveness of the associative experiment in identifying the doctors’ communicative intentions as well as in monitoring the evaluative component of these in professional medical communication has been confirmed.
TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATION STUDIES
This article is concerned with translation issues of The Song of Earendil by J. R. R. Tolkien, the poem included in The Lord of the Rings and incorporated into the narrative with Bilbo as the internal author and Frodo as the listener. The first part of the research provides detailed analysis of the poem contextual role as well as its perception by the characters and the reader. Imbued with various details and proper names, The Song highlights Еarendil’s voyage, one of the most essential narratives in Tolkien’s mythology (the Legendarium), however left beyond the bounds of The Lord of the Rings and not completely understood by the reader or Frodo, for the latter is listening to the Song being in a most peculiar, dreamlike state of mind evoked by elven singing he previously attends to. Frodo’s mood correlates not only and not so much with the poem’s narrative, but with its style and poetic features, especially the verse form and the rhyme scheme. The latter uses triple assonances as additional rhyme, connecting the clauses of the odd lines with the first halves of the subsequent even lines and bringing forth a notably melodical, ‘elvish’ impression.
In this respect, the verse form of The Song of Earendil takes on particular importance in relation to poetic translation; and retaining the main metrical and phonoaesthetic features of the poem seems necessary for achieving translation equivalence as well as maintaining the effect derived from the context of the novel. These features are considered using the example of four Russian translations of the Song (by A. A. Kistyakovsky, I. B. Grinshpun, S. A. Stepanov, and V. G. Tikhomirov). Comparative analysis of these translations shows a tendency for the translators to change the verse form significantly either by using more fluent rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures (as Kistyakovsky or Tikhomirov do), or by simplification (e.g. Grinshpun) and neutralisation of some other poetic features (like the use of proper names). The most consistent, although partial, representation of the original poetic form, can be found in Stepanov’s translation only. As for some other translation solutions regarding verse form and vocabulary, they appear to be non-equivalent. At the end of the article, the author presents his own translation of The Song of Еarendil, aimed at retaining the above listed features of its poetic form.