Perception of the image of time in Russian and Japanese linguocultures is analysed. An association experiment has become the main experimental method. Three samplings are under consideration: that of Russians of the early 1990s, that of Russians of the early 21st century, and that of the Japanese of the early 21st century. Russians and the Japanese share general human values, but cultural differences stand out in association reactions of Russian and Japanese respondents. The experimental material available shows that the Japanese are more time-conscious than Russians. The Japanese tend to consider things in a long-term perspective, while for Russians a medium-term perspective is more urgent. The specificity of hieroglyphs leads the Japanese to perceiving a close connection between time and space, while the Russian language does not provide clues of the kind, which results in fewer reactions indicating space in Russian samplings. The paper argues that the perception of time image has altered in the Russian linguoculture recently. Russians of the early 1990s lost their axiological targets in the turmoil of the Soviet Union collapse, which is not characteristic of the 21st century Russians, who started to regain their emotional stability.

The paper discusses the risks of distortion of the results of a free associative experiment due to the essence of its procedure. The matter is that the “canonical” experiment’s instruction urges the participants to produce and write down at least three reactions to the proposed stimulus. It doesn’t consider the risk that each subsequent reaction, the second and/or the third one, may be induced not by the initial stimulus, but by the previous reaction which thus may also act like an occasional unintentional stimulus because not intended by the researcher. Theoretically, there a risk that the obtained data might distort real connections between the intended stimulus and respondents’ reactions in the participants’ mental lexicon. But in reality the impact of such a distortion is not of major importance: the analysis of 6782 "stimulus - reaction (1, 2 or 3 reactions)" pairs shows that the number of cases where the described shift occurs is not statistically significant. The number of erroneous reactions which are obviously induced by the procedure flaw itself (that is, each of the following is given to the previous one, rather than to the stimulus) amounts to no more than 1% of the total number of reactions. Therefore, such an error can’t be considered as regular and must be referred to as insignificant. It’s clear now that cases where each reaction of the three is associated with the initial (intended) stimulus or each of the following reactions refers to the "stimulus + first reaction" complex largely predominate. At the same time, as it was argued long before by Sechenov, Polivanov, Fortunatov, and Kruchevsky ( Kruszewski), verbal associating is a random (stochastic) process, which means that a large majority of reactions’ meanings are unpredictable. On these grounds the author concludes that this is due to the peculiarities of the individual’s mental lexicon which is the product of their minds and consciousness. The way of their exteriorization must also be taken into account. When, triggered by the stimulus, the process of associating starts, a huge number of reactions is activated at the same time in the human brain, but their writing down can take place only sequentially. Thus, the linear character of writing may become partly responsible for an erroneous shift of the stimulus.

The article considers the directions of changes in modern youth’s value orientations as they are detected in the associative-verbal network, a research product of a mass psycholinguistic associative experiment, carried out in Siberia and the Far East, Russia from 2008 to 2013 and accessible in the form of an electronic associative resource known as SIBAS. In the context of the current ethno-cultural identification this process tends to become a topical issue. The study emphasizes the importance of an integrated interdisciplinary approach involving data collection from various social sciences and humanities. One popular trend of today’s cultural linguistic and anthropological paradigm consists in researching modern linguistic processes through linguistic personalities of individual native speakers. So, the article considers some theoretical aspects related to formation of the ethno-cultural identity on the basis of ethnic self-consciousness, represented by a series of images, which include a certain set of elements of ethnicity that differ for each ethnic group. In this regard, the paper considers new tools and methods to retrieve and interpret ethnic socio-cultural meanings, present in the sources of associative images in the form of linguistic reactions characterizing a given ethnic linguistic consciousness. The advantages of the modern electronic associative resources are being substantiated. Continuous addition of psycholinguistic data require an improvement of the search tools and development of ethnosemantic tagging. This may be very helpful to satisfy researchers’ or ordinary user needs. To meet this end, the paper proposes some tentative solutions of tagging which is tailored to the specific tasks of professional cultural linguistic electronic corpora in general, and is apt, in particular, to cope with the challenges of the psycholinguistic material of associative databases such as SIBAS. These are illustrated on the example of two thematic groups (associative fields), "Characteristics of man" and "Types of self-identification". Our main task was to exemplify the semantic taxonomy and the techniques of evaluative tagging meeting the needs of associative databases. The principles of analyzing dynamic characteristics of socio-cultural data related to ethnic self-identification in youths are considered, too. The author emphasizes advantages of the data from associative sources rather than that found in explanatory dictionaries in order to know with certainty the meaningful cultural connotation of a linguistic item. Comparing semantics of diachronic data from SIBAS and RAS contained in their associative fields "nuzhno" (≈ you have to, you are to…), the author discovered some relevant quantitative and qualitative shifts in value meanings which reflect highly likely new representations of young Russians about life in the context of self-identification.

The purpose of this study was to reveal the preferences in ambiguity resolution of adjunct attachments in Mongolian (referred to as high vs. low attachment). The off-line questionnaire technique in Mongolian native speakers was used to collect the material. The sample comprises data from 193 monolingual Mongolian schoolchildren and university students aged from 16 to 24 years. The typical structure of Mongolian sentences with two potential attachment sites for the adjunct is as shown by the example: Гэмт хэрэгтэн тагтан дээр байсан жүжигчнийNP2 үйлчлэгч-бусгуйгNP1 буудсан (The criminal shot the maidNP1 of the actressNP2 standing on the balcony). Statistical results of responses’ analysis show that young Mongolian native speakers tend to prefer high attachment strategy (59% of total number of cases). This percentage of NP1-preference choices shows a high level of significance of the non-random strategy when Mongolian native speakers have to resolve ambiguity of high attachment of adjunct (Z = 6.77, p <0.001). For the Mongolian language, this off-line study is the first to establish such a psycholinguistic preference. Preliminarily, it is possible to claim that Mongolian may be included in the group of languages with high attachment preference (along with Japanese, Korean, Italian, Greek, German, and Russian).

The article presents the result of the semantic analysis of polysemous collateral constructions in the Yakut (Sakha) language. The method of analysis takes into account possible lexical-semantic affiliation of the verbal predicate of the construction and the nature of the actants present in the situation. The cases of semantic correlation in the Yakut (Sakha) language along the line of causative-passive, passive-reflexive, reflexive-passive, reciprocative-iterative are considered. These types of polysemy may be found not only in the Yakut and other Turkic languages, but also in the languages of other typological groups.

Variability of dialect phraseological units of the Yakut language is investigated. For the first time in Yakut linguistics, under study is the relationship between the dialectal and literary phraseological units of the Yakut language, this being manifested in their variability and the sphere of dialectal use. A typology of options is proposed.

Biographies are used in teaching a wide range of subjects, thus representing a universal type of material that can be valuable in a TESL classroom. The benefits of this study bear relevance to assessing writing strategies that may be used by experts in a variety of fields of inquiry. The article focuses on assessing stylistic variation in biographical texts in English, using the material of a number of highly acclaimed biographies of Sir Winston Spencer Churchill written by the authors for whom English is their first language. The article contains an analysis of the conceptual and linguistic parameters of stylistic variation in these biographical texts. It considers a number of linguistic levels: morphology and vocabulary, in connection with the kinds of inherent and adherent connotations conveyed. Minor and major kinds of syntax are studied in relation to the stylistic neutrality and non-neutrality of the units under study. The functioning of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs is analyzed in order to establish the type of general conceptual characteristics the texts demonstrate. A specialized and non-emotional type of content is based on the predominance of formal specialized connotations; an emotional and non-specialized type of content is, on the contrary, constituted by emotional, expressive and evaluative connotations. The analytic technique developed shows that there is correlation between the conceptual characteristics of a biographical text and the kind of argumentation it contains. The specialized and non-emotional type of content correlates with arguments supported by factual data; the emotional and non-specialized type corresponds to arguments eluding references to other sources. The results of the analysis undertaken can be applied to designing courses on stylistics of the English and other languages. Also, they can be used to outline a writing strategy for professional journalists, historians, writers, politicians, economists, etc. Purpose: to consider different linguistic levels, analyzing the functioning of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and syntactic constructions - in relation to the type of content they serve to convey (emotional / non-emotional, specialized / non-specialized). Results: the analysis shows that the emotional and expressive qualities of biographical texts are inversely proportional to the amount of explicit facts they contain, i.e. the more informative and logically structured a biographical text is the less the author tends to be emotionally involved in the account of events, and vice versa. This analytic technique can be further developed with the methods of applied (computational) linguistics. Conclusion: a connotation-centered approach to studying the quantitative and qualitative properties of biographical texts can be successfully applied to teaching and studying authentic biographies, and may be extended to analyzing texts of other genres and styles.

The paper presents an adaptation of the model of deep text analysis elaborated earlier by Yu. V. Popov and T. P. Tregubovich for German. The development of the model for Chinese is based on principles of the general linguistic predicational conception of V.A. Kurdyumov, which nowadays is the only one taking into account the specificity of isolating languages. The advantage of the model, presented in the article, consists in revealing the mechanism of Chinese text production and presenting the functioning of cohesion phenomenon not only in the micro-, but also in the macrostructure of text. The algorithm of analysis, proposed in the article, has a certain degree of universality, and, with some modifications, it can be implemented in text analysis of different types of languages. It is concluded that with additional elucidations for several steps of the algorithm it is possible to use the proposed model of deep text analysis both for monologic and dialogic texts.

This article discusses typological characteristics of the Chinese and Russian languages from the standpoint of the theory of V. M. Solntsev. The author offers the criteria for the comparative analysis of languages of different typologies. The main focus is on comparing the two languages at the syntactic level. It is concluded that, taking into account the asymmetry of different syntactic structures in this pair of isolating and inflectional languages, it is necessary to develop a special contrastive methodology of teaching translation, in order to solve successfully many translation puzzles related to their syntactic and text levels.

This article aims to single out quasi-conditional constructions in Catalan and describe their main types. The author proceeds from the hypothesis that Catalan quasi-conditional constructions must show considerable similarity with quasi-conditional constructions in Russian, English, French, and other languages. The number of the constructions addressed is about 1 000 examples from Catalan texts by native Catalan authors and about 2 000 examples from Catalan texts by non-Catalan authors, selected by total sampling. The paper shows that quasi-conditional constructions, although formally similar to conditional constructions, differ on certain points from them. Their protasis does not express hypothetical condition, apodosis doesn’t imply consequence, the condition-consequence meaning is often missing from them altogether. In contrast to conditional constructions, transformation of quasi-conditionals ones into formally narrative constructions doesn’t change their meaning. Quasi-conditional constructions can be split into five major groups: presumptive constructions, constructions with protasis in the function of parenthesis, conditional-evaluative constructions, conditional-causal constructions, and logical conclusion constructions. The observables selected as criteria for this classification include: Construction meaning (comparative, existential, evaluative, causative constructions etc.); Changeability of the main dependent clause order; Use of markers. Both my analysis and literature on conditional constructions in other languages confirm that the structure of Catalan quasi-conditional constructions is similar to their counterparts in other languages. The findings can be used for teaching purposes as well as for research in Catalan, other Romance languages, or in typology/syntax.

The article considers the issues of further development of the methodological base of comparative linguistic-conceptual studies, contrastive linguistics and lexicography. It describes and illustrates an integrated, comprehensive and holistic methodology of the lexical-conceptual-semantic analysis of one culturally significant fragment of the semantic space of English and Russian represented in this study by the cultural concept КУЛЬТУРНЫЙ ЧЕЛОВЕК / CULTURED PERSON. This analysis is presented in the form of a complete algorithm for the comparative study of the chosen national conceptual spheres (known in Russian Cultural Linguistics as conceptospheres). The algorithm includes a sequence of about 25 “steps” aimed to reveal step by step all the convergent and divergent characteristics of the lexical units that name the cultural concepts under study.

The article analyses the lexeme London, especially the syntagmatic sequences with it which are regarded as key realisations of the London supertext that the name of the capital generated in the English language and literature. Supertext is viewed as a language unit - an emic text, which is the semantic invariant for a group of texts that have a similar topic. At the level of mental representations, any ethno-specific cultural concept, for instance, corresponds to its supertext which may be either real (verbalised) or potential. In accordance with this conception, the London text is constituted by a set of semantic components and contains mental algorithms for their predication. Being deployed from its text paradigm (sort of mental matrix), it may be translated (that is verbalised) by means of semantically related syntactic sequences. The article establishes the etymology of the lexeme London and considers its derivatives. The necessity of analysing the etymology of the word lies in the fact that the London supertext incorporates both contemporary or relatively stable meaning and the initial diachronic meaning to be looked for in the lexeme that names it. The latter constitutes the “memory” of the supertext, which is present in it in posse as a set of virtualised semantic components. Further examined are a corpus of set phrases and phraseological units containing the lexeme in question. A study of the derivatives of the lexeme London (ten in number) has yielded a fuller access to the structural components of the supertext considered. The study has taken into account two sememes of each derivative - those of its stem and of its affix. As the article demonstrates, the semantics of the derivatives largely depends on the realisations of the supertext which they are part of. It has been revealed that a number of the derivatives analysed have the status of rare or nonce-words. The stem of the derivative ensures a concrete filling of a general schematic or frame-type action expressed by the affix. Set phrases (114) and phraseological units (15) with the word London have been considered as realisations of various semantic components of the London text. These units and phrases account for the inclusion of the supertext into intertextual paradigms, and reflect the standard object-to-object relations that are typical of the British civilisation. Among the set phrases, the article distinguishes compound non-idiomatic nominations (75), bound non-idiomatic terms (25), and phraseological units featuring various degrees of idiomaticity (14). Phraseological units permit tracing the historical stages in the formation of the London text, and testify to a high frequency of the use of its name. Phraseological units also incorporate realisations of the peripheral components of the supertext, resulting from the actualisation of its idiolectal semantic components.

The purpose of analyzing possible interpretations of the antithesis Sense and Sensibility in the title of J. Austen's novel is to provide a theoretical basis for the author’s broader research. Presented also in other articles, the entire study is devoted to the analysis of different interpretations of the antithesis in French and Russian translations: both in the title and in the main message (macrocontext) of the novel. As a practical part of the research, the author presents in the current article her own arguments related to possible new interpretations of the antithesis. Namely: 1) hypothesis about a dual nature in the meaning of the antithesis itself: not only the traditional opposition "reason vs. feelings", but also the sense of objective reality vs. individual’s subjective sensibility; 2) comparison of the moral message of the novel (opposition "reason vs. feelings" in favor of the merits of reason) and modern theories of emotional intelligence. The author tries to prove that the four-branch model of emotional intelligence by P. Salovey and J. Mayer is based on the classic message - the merits of reason, however completed with commercial and pragmatic aspects. In addition, this new interpretation of the antithesis (sense of objective reality vs. individual’s subjective sensibility) is complemented by the author with her own possible Russian versions of the novel title, reflecting the new meaning and at the same time preserving the alliteration that the English original has.