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NSU Vestnik. Series: Linguistics and Intercultural Communication

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Vol 22, No 1 (2024)
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THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS

5-16 208
Abstract

Despite Brown and Levinson’s original claims that politeness is a universal concept perceived identically in all cultures, it has long been established that different societies perceive this concept differently. A lack of understanding regarding these differences may lead to intercultural conflict and thus research is required, especially in cultures in which such research is scarce, such as that of Croatia. This article focuses on the comparative corpus analysis of both the word politeness in English and its Croatian “counterpart,” the word pristojnost, in dictionaries and their use in corpora. Furthermore, it aims to establish how Croatian speakers perceive pristojnost and the quality of pristojnost (or the lack of it) in people. For this purpose, a qualitative and quantitative comparative corpus analysis based on the definitions of the words in question in certain English and Croatian dictionaries, their usage in their respective corpora and their translations in each of the two languages, as well as a small-scale quantitative and qualitative analysis of a questionnaire, completed by Croatian participants, were conducted. On the basis of such a four-step analysis, it has been concluded that both English politeness and Croatian pristojnost have two meanings, one connected to culture/etiquette, and one oriented towards interpersonal relationships; however, pristojnost has another meaning, that of satisfactoriness. It has also been deduced that pristojnost slightly differs from politeness, as it focuses more on interpersonal behaviour and interaction, rather than social norms and etiquette, which the concept of politeness seems primarily to focus on. Understanding these differences is crucial for high quality communication, especially in intercultural and multicultural contexts, e.g. in academic settings. For this reason, research on a larger scale should be carried out to establish how politeness and its equivalents are perceived in various cultural contexts; this article thus serves as a call for research expansion.

17-26 152
Abstract

The advent of the digital society has led to a change in many ways of interaction. People’s communication has become more demonstrative, since technology allows them to easily and instantly present themselves and their lives to a wide audience. The information age encourages people to demonstrate their individuality and express themselves, with social media becoming a platform for expressing personal beliefs, interests, creating and maintaining an attractive image. The article studies demonstrative tonality of communication. The scientific novelty of the research is that demonstrative tonality has not been studied before. The purpose of the paper is to identify and describe the main types of demonstrative tonality in communication. The research methods are an interdisciplinary approach and a psycholinguistic analysis of the communicants’ speech output. The material for the analysis was drawn from television interviews of 2012-2023. The study shows that at the present stage in the digital era demonstrative communication is a common way of interaction and a mechanism of self-presentation and self-identification. Demonstrative communication is defined as a structurally forming communicative category of spectral type – tonality, which determines the process of speech communication and performs the function of self-manifestation and means of emotional impact on the recipient. It is emphasized that demonstrative tonality manifests itself in various social and communicative spheres: official, unofficial, administratively or legally regulated, unregulated and dominant, causing a positive or negative response from the addressee. As a result of the research, it has been established that demonstrative communicative tonality is actualized at all language levels and is implemented in speech products through the use of various linguistic and non-linguistic means. The basis for constructing a typology of demonstrative tonality is proposed; it consists of such criteria as the method of presentation to the recipient and the addressee’s reaction. Based on the communicative approach, four main types of demonstrative tonality are put forward: explicit, hidden, positive, and negative. The results obtained can be used in the course on semiotics and psycholinguistics

COMPUTER AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

27-49 191
Abstract

The article presents a corpus of texts with argumentative annotation pertaining to different types of scientific Internet communication. The corpus is annotated using the ArgNetBank Studio platform. The genres and functional characteristics of scientific Internet communication texts are discussed. The purpose of creating the corpus and the principles of selecting the data to be included are formulated, the types of selected texts are defined. The peculiarities of argumentative annotation of scientific and popular science articles with commentaries, which, unlike other types of texts included in the corpus, are internet-dialogues, are considered. This determines the specificity of their argumentative structure. We also discuss the issue of identifying argumentative schemes that arises within the process of annotating the texts of different types. A trial experiment has shown that for a number of pairs of schemes the choice is difficult. We propose taking these difficulties into account while developing a methodology of annotation and defining distinguishing semantic features of argumentative schemes; this approach is illustrated by analyzing the schemes from one of the considered pairs. In the course of annotating the analytical texts, the necessity of adding new reasoning schemes and supplementing some of the existing ones has arisen. The paper provides formalized descriptions of such schemes and illustrative examples from the analyzed corpus texts.

50-64 177
Abstract

This paper presents the results of the social mood study of St. Petersburg citizens based on text data from the social network VKontakte. The proposed method involves juxtaposition of the social media users’ tone of discussions with quantitative data describing the city infrastructure. The comparison is possible due to the fact that text data can be tied to a region. The article substantiates the method by which the concepts “social mood” and “social well-being” are combined. Approaches to sentiment analysis of specific textual data are also described (quality metrics of the models used). The paper demonstrates the final applicable results: the data are plotted on the map of the city.

COGNITIVE STUDIES AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

65-86 115
Abstract

The paper is not about translation of the Bible into Russian, English or French, although its versions are widely presented in the research material. The goal is to compare the biblical discourse on truth and vérité with that of the post-truth era, its modern counterpart signified by the emblematic opposition of fact vs lies. Studying verbalizations of the above-mentioned concept has always been very important for the three cultures, but now, with a post-truth political ideology rising, its relevance for the English language and culture has increased noticeably. We study correlation of the words truth and vérité, pravda (often righteousness), istina (verity) in a number of Bible versions, old and new, to show that semantic consistency between the three cultures may be still achieved indirectly (that is without source texts) in this important area. Taking into account the factor of multiple versions has become essential for English-speaking cultures, it is quite important for the French community, and instructive for the Russian culture in terms of evaluating its consequences. The article presents only quantitative data on the density/variance (or dispersion) of concepts in the same biblical verse and the frequency of lexical ways of its verbalization in different versions of the Bible. The diagnostic value of frequency indicators for a meaningful interpretation is revealed, first, between the three languages; second, between the Old and New Testaments, and third, between their various books. To understand the functional load of the concepts under study in different versions, it is essential to know the frequency of their verbalizers, which sometimes differs greatly even within the same language for many reasons, including a new one – the task to produce a version easy to comprehend. It has been found that, as a rule, the degree of semantic correlation between the concepts under study is high, but in the “easy to read” versions a variability of lexical and syntactic means in the same contexts is significant as well as the intricacy of their refractions. This conclusion is valid, first of all, for the correlations of PRAVDA with its foreign-language counterparts. The form truths, which was not used in the early versions of the Bible, is now admitted by the most recent ones. This probably has to do with the secular philosophy of truth. And, finally, in the latest English-language versions, the word fact – the main competitor of truth in the discourse of the post-truth era – began to appear. This, however, does not refer to the word-combination fact-checking which still seems to be radically hostile to the Bible Truth discourse.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATION STUDIES

87-104 131
Abstract

This article presents a review of the concept of presence in technology-mediated interpreting research. It briefly considers a theoretical framework behind presence as a multidimensional category that deals with the integrated nature of spatial and social experience in mediated environments. The review encompasses twelve English-language articles identified through keyword search in the Scopus database, covering studies of remote interpreting scenarios in both community and conference settings. A closer look at the presence definitions brought together in this review shows that although interpreting researchers draw on the theoretical considerations from Telepresence Studies, there is no unified approach to defining presence. In interpreting research, the term ‘presence’ can refer to both interpreters’ subjective experience and the fact of technological mediation (virtual presence opposed to physical presence of an interpreter in the room). Lack of presence experienced by an interpreter is also referred to as alienation, isolation, detachment, feeling of distance, lack of involvement, and difficulty grasping the intentions of the speakers. While interpreting scholars ultimately aim to mitigate psychological discomfort caused by remoteness, they rarely specifically document interpreters’ presence experience. Therefore, in their framework, presence often overlaps with the concepts of immersion, involvement, cognitive absorption, and flow. The distinction between social and spatial presence phenomena is often disregarded. Thus, presence serves as an instrumental label, a causal factor in the assessment of interpreters’ psychological wellbeing and their attitude to the new workplace configuration. While this does not go against the general understanding of presence as a subjective experience conjured by media exposure, this approach does not fully utilize the broad explanatory power of the models of presence that take into account the influence of mediation on such key interpreting mechanisms as attention allocation, cognition, memory, imagination, spatial orientation, and anticipation. In this regard, a more comprehensive treatment of presence can be found in the foundational papers by P. Mouzourakis and B. Moser-Mercer, as well as in more recent applied studies of cloud-based RSI. Integrating process models of interpretation and presence may offer a more holistic perspective for future remote interpreting research.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS. LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE STUDIES

105-119 129
Abstract

The paper aims at identifying the key features of the Russia-centered discourse both on surface and deep levels. The empirical basis for the research is comprised by the Rossica-T corpus of book titles, encompassing data for 18-21 centuries. Titles are viewed as the most distinguished parts of texts, to which the most significant information is promoted, thus forming the quintessence of the discourse they represent. The research is based on three datasets – the English, Finnish and Japanese subcorpora totaling 590 titles. The data was subject to analysis with the help of the AntConc corpus manager toolkit and deep discourse analysis underlying the manual annotation of the corpus along seven groups of parameters. The surface level analysis focuses on three aspects: syntactic, lexical, and stylistic. The syntactic analysis revealed a spectrum of structural patterns whose frequency is largely conditioned by the requirements of the title genre; yet, being genre-conditioned, they are also partly discourse-conditioned, serving to verbalize key concepts of the Russia-centered discourse and to expand the structure of the title so as to maximize its expressive capacity. The stylistic analysis allowed us to identify a restricted set of stylistic means, partly correlating with the genre canon (e.g. alliteration), and partly – with the discourse canon (e.g. metaphors, intertextual links). The lexical analysis helped determine two markers – a genre-specific (naming the genre of the book the title represents) and a discourse-specific (xenonymic Russianisms). Cross-linguistic comparison of strategies introducing Russianisms into texts describing Russia in different languages revealed the greatest degree of specificity of the Japanese-language discourse where the method of introducing and marking Russianisms is predetermined by their “gairaigo” status. Yet, this specificity does not go contrary to the norms and regularities of the language of secondary cultural orientation, which allows for the conclusion of a universal mechanism of a language cultural reorientation. The task of identifying the conceptual mainstays of the discourse was approached in two ways: (1) categorization of the subcorpora keywords and (2) interpretation of the subcorpora semantic annotation results. Both approaches allow for the conclusion of a partial overlap in conceptual mainstays for the three discourse types, with a noticeable variation in the choice of the key concepts’ representants.

120-131 134
Abstract

The article is dedicated to the study of self-presentation strategy and speech tactics considered as a communicative strategy aimed at creating a certain image of a politician and changing the conceptual views of the recipients in order to manipulate their consciousness. Implementation of such strategies and tactics can become an effective method to achieve established goals, both state-related and personal. The research material includes public speeches of the Latin American politicians at the 73rd and 77th UN General Assembly. The speeches we analyze are part of the modern Latin American discourse which is defined as ideologically heterogenic with predominant social justice and inequality-oriented approach, expressiveness, and anti-imperialism ideas. The relevance of the present study is determined by the need to clarify the theoretical and pragmatic foundations of the political discourse analysis. For this purpose, self-presentation strategies and speech tactics are studied in comparison. The results show that in the status-conditioned discourse two dominant ideas underlie the self-presentation strategy– “our people”, having a positive axiological status and aimed at changing the views of Latin America’s society as traditionally marginalized, and “we are a victim”, having a negative axiological status, which the politicians use to justify political and economic failures. The speech tactics includes “strong personality”, “appeal to authority”, “appeal to historical documents”, “appeal to constitutive documents”. We have found that the two dominant ideas are made up of some subdominant ideas. These have the same axiological characteristics in the speeches of Latin American politicians which fully corresponds to the historical context of these countries. Thus, the future studies can be centered on studying speech strategies and tactics of personality-conditioned discourse in the respective countries’ media.

132-144 167
Abstract

This article is an attempt to study multimodal means used to reveal pragmatic potential of advertising posts in the social network VKontakte. In the paper we explore the concept of multimodality and multimodal text as a semiotic unity. We proceed from the fact that such a unity is achieved through coherence of social context. An advertising text is understood as a multimodal complex in which information is transmitted through a variety of semiotic codes which are socially and culturally determined. These codes serve as semiotic resources to produce meaning. We claim that advertising messages in the social network VKontakte are a form of a media text whose inherent characteristics exceed verbal means and possess such features as coherence, recontextuality, multilevelness, multimodality and multimediality. We have used a multimodal discourse analysis, which is in line with social semiotics concepts and works by G. Kress. He argues that the goal of such an analysis is to develop a number of methods which make it possible to study the interaction between social meanings and their polysemiotic representations in a text. The analysis is aimed at exploring four key components: text; context, actions, and interactions of participants in the discourse; the impact of the text and ideology. The research is carried out at the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, a textual analysis of both verbal and non-verbal means was conducted. At the macro level, we singled out discursive strategies employed to influence potential customers and determined relationships between directly observable (verbal and non-verbal units) and implicit ideas these units convey. The results reveal that cognitive strategies encode interpretations of cultural experience and forms of social interaction. Despite the importance of the verbal semiotic code, non-verbal means are an essential part of advertising messages that form a multidimensional unity of all the semiotic codes. Visual representational structures serve to communicate such important socio-cultural codes as PART OF OUR WORLD VS OTHERS (INVOVEMENT VS DETACHMENT), SOCIAL DISTANCE, POWER. All this allows us to create an integral image of the thermal resort “Baden-Baden” and intensifies the degree of pragmatic impact on potential customers.

145-155 123
Abstract

The article examines dog idioms of the Galician language from a cultural-semiotic perspective. The analysis is based on 150 idioms. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the metaphorical image of a dog in Galician phraseology and to analyze its symbolic meanings in the Galician language worldview. A symbolic meaning of this or that word is based on the social role importance of the object or phenomenon designated by this word in a certain ethnic culture. Idiomatic symbolism represents ethnopsychological characteristics of a native speaker and demonstrates the influence of the language on shaping the people’s mentality. The analyzed zoonym manifests various types of symbolism. The metaphorization of the zoonym “dog” is based both on the behavioral characteristics of the animal and on a person’s attitude to it. In the phraseological corpus of the Galician language, the animal possesses a contradictory dual characteristic, mainly negative. It has been revealed that the image of a dog in the Galician worldview is that of a loyal and devoted friend, having intelligence and experience. However, the image of a dog in proverbs, sayings, and figurative comparisons seems to convey the worst features: it is angry, aggressive, insatiable, lazy; besides, a dog’s life is hard and poor.

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ISSN 1818-7935 (Print)