The study is built around determining the main features of written verbal interaction between a person and automated systems within the framework of the concepts “communication” and “dialogue”. An assessment is made of the validity of using the term “communication” in the context of interaction with chatbots, during which the characteristic features of this form of communication are highlighted, such as quasi-synchrony, immediacy, focus on interactivity, lack of social relationships between interlocutors, and a rigid formal structure. Interaction with a chatbot in natural language in a traditional question-answer dialogue form allows the user to achieve their communication goals in a familiar and comfortable way. Using the example of analyzing speech interactions with the ChatGPT-3.5 chatbot, it was revealed that communication with text generators is of a mixed nature, including elements of both oral and written speech. Automated systems, such as the ChatGPT-3.5 chatbot, are text generators and are used primarily to create a ready-made “text product” for a specific user task, which determines the text-oriented nature of the chatbot’s remarks. The text generated by the chatbot must be understandable, comply with language norms, and exist outside the current context of interaction. At the same time, in interaction with automated systems, elements of oral speech activity are revealed, such as a dialogical form of information exchange and a spontaneous nature of communication. The spontaneity of communication is manifested in this case in elliptical constructions, typos and grammatical errors in the user’s remarks. Interactivity is the ability of the user to intervene and interrupt or correct the process of creating a message. However, such communication cannot be called synchronous since the participants in the interaction cannot respond to each other’s messages immediately, but only after receiving a message in the complete form. This allows us to qualify this form of communication as quasi-synchronous.

The purpose of this article is to identify ethnocultural semantics of zoonyms denoting species of the squirrel family in the Altai language. In the analysis of lexical units, a comparative method was used, as well as methods of semantic, component and contextual analyses. The material for the analysis of zoonyms was extracted from dictionaries, folklore, literary texts, as well as from the Altai native speakers’ discourse. The novelty of the study lies in the consideration of the semantic and motivational features of zoolexemes denoting the squirrel family species as well as in identifying principles of their nomination.

Metaphors and metonyms associated with squirrels appeared in the hunting lexicon on the basis of certain denotative signs of their look and behaviour stereotypes, habitat, as well as on the basis of metaphorization and connotation. One of the ways of representing zoonyms is figurative characterization of animals by the sounds they make. Euphemisms, onomatopoeic verbs and interjections are used to nominate the animals. Another way to nominate animals is their color designation, which has metaphorical figurativeness and emotional evaluation. Metaphorical identification of the squirrel family animals with other animals gives vivid imagery to these euphemisms.

In view of anthropocentric nature of language, squirrel zoonyms functioning, shows a clear zoomorphization of a person on the one hand, and anthropomorphization and mythologization of animals, on the other. When anthropomorphizing the image of an animal, transference occurs on the basis of semantic features – moral, ethical, emotional, mental, social: “greedy” (about a chipmunk), “touchy” and “cunning” (about a gopher). Social metaphors are based on the identification of a squirrel with a “collector of tribute”, a marmot with a “master” of the steppe, who has “servants”. In zoomorphization, transference of animal traits to humans is based on an assessment of their moral, ethical, physical, and intellectual qualities. Metaphorically, a squirrel and a ground squirrel both mean a fast, nimble, hardworking person, a marmot describes someone lazy. The image of a gopher is likened to a cunning, stupid, thieving person, capturing someone else’s; the image of a chipmunk is that of a greedy, naive, and gullible person; a sage, a respected elder, is identified with the beaver.

To conclude, animal names denoting species of the squirrel family are widely represented in the Altai language, as a variety of texts shows. They make up a special lexico-semantic field and are a significant fragment of the Altai world view with a large number of associations and evaluative connotations they acquired in the process of their functioning.

This article deals with the issue of lexical explication of geocultural territory images in tourist discourse. As a linguistic tool for creating authentic images of spaces in “other cultures”, the author considers exotic lexemes functioning in the relatively new magazine “Russian Traveler” as a written alternative of tourist discourse. By continuous sampling of the issues for the period 2023–2024 a selection of 238 exotic words was made. These words were interpreted with the help of lexicographic and ethnographic sources as well as contextual analysis. In the process of systematising the linguistic material, 12 thematic groups of exoticisms with different frequency were identified: “Natural geographical objects”, “Food and drinks”, “Mythology”, “Plant world”, etc. These groups describe basic fragments of the ethnic world view. The use of various thematic groups of exoticisms-appellatives as well as simultaneous functioning of realonyms and mythonyms, among which there are theonyms, hydronyms, anthroponyms, demononyms, toponyms, and other semantic subgroups of the above lexicon, makes it possible to create geocultural images of territories at the verbal level of the analysed texts in conjunction with their physical and geographical, sociocultural, traditional and domestic, ethnic, and other components. In general, exotic vocabulary in tourist discourse actualises readers’ background knowledge about “other” countries, regions, towns and cities, explicates ritual meanings, supports ethnostereotypes, thus contributing to the promotion of a tourist product.

The analysis of Russian characters in the world’s literature is of special interest to researchers. The relevance of the work is also related to the fact that Oscar Wilde’s early plays have not been studied well enough. The purpose of the paper is to reveal how the sacred ideal of madonna (beloved lady) inspired by D. Alighieri’s work is incarnated by the female protagonists of Oscar Wilde’s two earliest plays Vera Sabouroff and the duchess of Padua. For this purpose, four main features (based on Vita Nuova by D. Alighieri) were selected: Sacredness, Eternity, Moral Purity, and Nobility (including Compassionate Love). Qualitative and quantitative analyses were used to explore their representation in the images of Vera Sabouroff and the duchess of Padua. It has been revealed that in Oscar Wilde’s earliest plays the woman represents a sort of guardian angel and mediator between man and God. Her compassion grows into instinctive maternal tenderness and self-abnegating love, which shows capacity for intense devotion. It has been concluded that the images of Russian peasant Vera Sabouroff and Paduan duchess Beatrice can be considered as two special interpretations of the madonna ideal inspired by D. Alighieri. The mission and existential function of this ideal is to preserve and strengthen the connection between the Divine, Eternal, Morally Pure, the artist’s work and his worldview. The paper introduces the concept of Oscar Wilde’s Russian madonna. The definition comprises Vera Sabouroff’s semantically rich image which harmoniously combines the sacred ideal of beloved lady (inspired by D. Alighieri’s work) and mental traits of female portraits from the 19th century Russian history, folklore, and literature (namely, from the works by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Ivan S. Turgenev, Alexander S. Pushkin, and Nikolay A. Nekrasov). The author probably became acquainted with Russian literature in his adolescence thanks to his mother Lady Wilde (Speranza), who had translated into English Alexander S. Pushkin’s poems. The paper opens up prospects for further re-evaluation of Vera Sabouroff’s place in Oscar Wilde’s artistic worldview. The research broadens our understanding of the Russian culture influence on the world’s literature.

The article presents the results of a cross-cultural affective images perception study by Americans and Russians and reveals the degree of cultural factor influence on the stimuli assessment by American and Russian men and women. The hypothesis is that assessments of affective images by American and Russian respondents will have statistical differences due to the linguistic and cultural specificity of the ethnic groups; it is also assumed there are cross-cultural gender differences in the assessment. The study used the method of psycholinguistic questioning with seven-point scaling. 84 images from the open American database of affective images (“Open Affective Standardized Image Set”) were used as research material. The respondents were 34 men and 58 women. The results of the analysis did not show significant cross-cultural differences in ratings of affective images with reference to valence type or emotional evaluation/response. In general, Americans and Russians had a similar distribution of image ratings. However, a statistically significant difference has been found in the ratings of images with different valence types (P < 0.001). Negative and positive images were rated higher by Russians in terms of emotional evaluation, in contrast to Americans, most of whose emotional responses had neutral ratings. There was also a statistically significant difference in the ratings of different thematic images (P < 0.05). Nature images were rated by Russians as causing a feeling of comfort, while Americans noted their neutral impact on them. Images of objects, on the contrary, received the opposite ratings from the respondents. Moreover, cross-cultural gender differences have been revealed between Russian and American women in image ratings based on emotional evaluation and valence parameters (P < 0.05). Russian women rated most of the images as having a positive or negative impact, while the majority of American women’s ratings tended to be neutral. This confirms the influence of the emotional stimulus, valence type, image theme, as well as gender factor on the processing of emotionally coloured units by representatives of different cultures.

Purpose. The article studies the linguocognitive features of stylistic devices’ (SDs) implementation in English-language media discourse. The research was done on the material of a representative selection of articles from quality press (including The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times) and involved two stages, making use of quantitative and frame analysis.

Results. Registering and counting the total number of SDs in the articles of the research corpus led us to conclude that the most actively employed SDs are metaphor, personification and metonymy, the latter two frequently entering into stylistic clusters, thus enhancing the emotional impact on the recipient. Studying the distribution of SDs in accordance with the language layers they occur on, demonstrates the overwhelming prevalence of lexical SDs over syntactic and phonological ones, which we are inclined to explain by the written form of the discourse analyzed. The frame analysis brings us to the conclusion that out of the three possible frame models (FMs) found in media texts (FM Phenomenon, FM Event, FM Personality) the one describing abstract phenomena is activated most commonly. The total number of SDs actualized in the articles of the three FMs is comparable, however, the ones representing the FM Event tend to contain fewer SDs, which can be accounted for by the genre of such articles which is the news.

Conclusion. The results obtained allow us to conclude that the patterns of stylistic devices’ distribution in media discourse are determined both by the internal structure of the discourse analyzed and by the frame models which underlie the semantics of media articles.

Automatic text summarization is one of the main tasks of natural language processing (NLP), which consists in creating a shorter version of the source text. In today’s world the amount of information consumed by people is constantly increasing, therefore more and more emphasis is being placed on the task of summarization. There are two main approaches to automatic text summarization: extractive and abstractive ones. The latter involves automatic creation of a summary text that may contain words and phrases not present in the source. This approach usually requires the usage of AI models, which creates a demand for large datasets labeled in a certain way. Despite significant advances in summarization of scientific and news articles, the methods and datasets applied to monologue documents are not always suitable for dialogue summarization. Besides, although there exists a considerable number of English-language summarization datasets, the number of those available in Russian is not yet sufficient. The paper is devoted to the labeling and description of a Russian-language dataset for group chat messages summarization and fine-tuning models for the task of abstractive summarization for the Russian language on a custom dialogue dataset. A parental chat with a teacher in WhatsApp was used as material for the dataset. The process of manually labeling the dataset consisted in dividing the entire group chat into separate dialogues, writing a summary, and adding topic labels for each of them. As a result, a dataset has been created, which includes 616 dialogues with a total of 3380 messages. The ruT5, mT5 and RuGPT models were selected for fine-tuning, the ruT5 and RuGPT models were pre-trained on a Russian-language dataset for automatic news summarization. The ROUGE–1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, BLEU and BERTScore metrics were used to evaluate the quality of the models. Subsequently, the ruT5 model, fine-tuned on the custom dataset, turned out to out-perform the baseline model in all the five metrics.

The article presents the results of analyzing argumentation patterns that are employed in scientific communication texts. We define argumentation patterns as models of separate arguments and their composite structures repeated across corpus texts. The corpus consists of 98 texts in three different genres: 50 scientific articles from the scientific electronic library CyberLeninka (https://cyberleninka.ru/), 20 popular science articles from the forum habr.com/ru (hereafter ‒ Habr articles), 28 scientific news texts from the Poisk aggregator of scientific news (poisknews.ru). Five experts in theoretical and applied linguistics have performed double annotation of the corpus texts using ArgNetBank Studio platform. Calculated inter-annotator agreement scores correspond to the “substantial agreement” range. Argumentation annotation follows the Argument Interchange Format standard. The results of annotation and the object of the analysis are argumentation graphs with two node types: information nodes (which correspond to argumentative statements) and scheme nodes (which, for each link between statements, indicate its reasoning model in accordance with Walton’s compendium). The study addresses the graphs obtained from the abovementioned graphs by excluding all information nodes and merging the incoming and outcoming links of each excluded information node into one link (thus the obtained graphs consist exclusively of scheme nodes) and the subgraphs of these obtained graphs. We perform a frequency-based analysis of subgraphs by the Frequent Subgraph Mining Method combined with Cordella VF2 algorithm implementation from the NetworkX library for isomorphism check. The analysis results in identification of argumentation patterns (repeating subgraphs from 1 to 9 node in size) that are employed in texts of all genres, one specific genre, as well as patterns repeated within separate texts. We show that scientific articles of the corpus exhibit the greatest stability and diversity of argumentation patterns, while popular science texts are marked by the active use of polemic argumentation, and patterns in scientific news are based on two reasoning models characteristic of compact argumentation. Patterns that repeat in separate texts show the same tendencies as genre-specific patterns. Using the identified patterns, we conduct clustering of the corpus texts with Ward and K-means algorithms. Resulting clusters correspond to groups of texts with similar argumentation strategies and exhibit homogeneity of texts by genre and thematic field. Identified patterns can be used not only for classifications but also for assessing the argumentative organization of texts extracting persuasive argumentation, its generation etc. Works on this topic are still underrepresented for texts in English, while for texts in Russian, such automatic analysis of argumentation patterns has not yet been performed.

The article proposes a typological description of the most common causal conjunctions (keďže, lebo and pretože) in Slovak in terms of coordination vs subordination meanings. The research is based on the Slovak National Corpus and grammatical descriptions, as well as on elicitation from a native speaker of Slovak through a questionnaire designed to identify relevant typological parameters. The parameters under study include the position of the causal clause relative to the consequence clause, as well as its propensity to occur with focus particles and under negation, to introduce answers to why-questions and occur on different semantic levels (content, epistemic and speech act levels in Eve Sweeter’s terms). Particular attention is paid to the latter, less studied, set of parameters. These parameters are often related to co- ordination and subordination properties, with coordinability regarded as a multi-parameter term (cf. a similar approach to transitivity by P. Hopper and S. Thompson or the differentiation of clitics from affixes by A. Zwicky and G. Pullum). Each of the three causal conjunctions under consideration proves to combine coordination and subordination features. Lebo as “the most coordinative” conjunction demonstrates only one subordination feature, an ability to introduce answers to why-questions (probably due to its origin from discourse markers used in coordinate constructions), while keďže proves to possess the highest proportion of subordination features. Moreover, keďže behaves heterogeneously with regard to speech act constructions where it can occur in imperative sentences, but not in interrogative ones. The conjunction pretože behaves as coordinate in semantic terms and as subordinate in terms of focusability. All the three conjunctions tend to function as coordinate in semantic terms while displaying varying behavior in the syntactic domain as regards the degree of focusability and the position of the causal clause.

Further research is required to describe typological properties of less common Slovak conjunctions.

The paper focuses on the essential nature of translation activity which implies that translation (as well as interpreting) manifests itself in two hypostases, so to speak – a service and a tool. Although these translation hypostases do not cause serious objections, their very existence being confirmed by objective reality, it is appropriate to apply a scientific approach to describing the specificity of their manifestation. For this purpose, the author goes beyond linguistics and turns to the research in marketing dealing with the complicated phenomenon “service” – from its definition to its distinctive characteristics. Extrapolating the results of the research on translation / interpreting, which is a separate area in the service industry, aimed at offering a particular type of help or use, has made it possible to verify the applicability of a service properties to translation. It has been found that translation / interpreting can hardly be regarded as a “pure” service and should rather be treated as those numerous services which have characteristics shared by goods, namely: tangibility, storability (for further use and distribution), contemporaneity (in case of interpreting) / non-contemporaneity (in case of translation) of production and consumption. Still, translation / interpreting has a one-hundred percent service property which is variability, or inconstancy of quality. This characteristic of translation in its first hypostasis, i.e. ser- vice, is crucial since it helps to understand the manifestation of the second hypostasis of translation – that of a tool. The variability of quality consists in the fact that a product, a text in target language created when providing a translation service, acting as a tool, can be endowed with a linguistic composition different from that of the source text, given that the need and expectation of a particular initiator and/or consumer (user) have been met by a translator / interpreter. The purpose of a different linguistic composition, which means that certain modifications are to be introduced to the textual characteristics of the product in terms of its content, or form and structure, is to ensure that the product is ergonomic enough, i.e. its usability for accomplishing the task, it is intended for, has been provided. Obviously, such a product in the true sense of the word, turns out to be peculiar not only for the initiator and/or consumer (user) due to a different linguistic composition of the text, but also for the translator / interpreter who acts as a service provider, being aware that the product he is creating and endowing with a peculiar linguistic composition is a means of meeting a peculiar need and expectation. Since it is the need that triggers the entire translation process, the need is used as a key concept to give the name to a translation theory proposed in this paper – a needs-tailored theory of translation. The needs-tailored theory of translation, viewing it as a service and a tool as its bedrock, considers the idea of differentiating between translation and other types of language mediation offered in Russian translation studies inconsistent, and insists that any text in the target language created on the basis of the source text regardless of its linguistic composition is recognized as translation. Instead of the traditional in Russian translation studies dichotomy “translation vs adaptive transcoding” the needs-tailored theory proposes a dichotomy “conventional translation vs peculiar translation”. The first category includes cases of rendering a translation / interpreting service when the resulting product repeats the source text in its linguistic composition, i.e. cases of carrying out a translation / interpreting in its traditional sense. The second category, as the term suggests, combines the cases of rendering a translation / interpreting service when the resulting product has a peculiar linguistic composition to satisfy a peculiar need in accordance with a peculiar expectation of the initiator and/ or consumer (user) of the translation.

The article discusses the issue of translating proper names from Russian into English in the animated series “Smeshariki / Kikoriki”, which came out in Russia between 2003 and 2012. The introduction provides a detailed description of proper name translation as a realia category and its significance in contemporary translation studies. The purpose of this research is also outlined as well as its novelty within the scientific paradigm. A brief overview of relevant literature sources on the issue is provided. The main part of the article presents the findings of a linguistic and cultural analysis that examines the specific features and methods used in translating proper names during the process of dubbing audio- visual content. Strategies for preserving, adapting, and omitting different types of onomastic units are discussed. Also, considered are translation techniques. Non-standard translation ways are looked at along with examples of their use in the dubbed versions of the animated series. The preservation strategy of proper names is found to be the most effective, as demonstrated by more than half of the examples cited in the article. Such statistics are explained by the significance of proper names in the plot structure of the animated series. The translator’s goal is to preserve the authors’ original meaning and intention as well as the national and cultural aspects of the work. This could enrich the background knowledge of viewers from the target language culture. In the final section of the article, the authors conclude that in order to achieve a successful and accurate translation of proper names, it is essential to consider various factors that affect the choice of a particular translation method. These are all possible limitations in audiovisual translation, lack of a unified strategy, existence of a dictionary equivalent for a translated proper name, level of visualization and significance of a proper name within the plot, educational level and age group of the audience as well as professionalism and creativity of the translator.