Articles

Area Studies is a relatively new academic discipline that is rapidly developing at the moment. It should be noted in this connection that the concept of Area Studies itself is often given alternative and even competing interpretations be researchers belonging to different academic schools. Despite the fact that the approaches used in Area Studies are rather different, though equally popular, practically all scholars working in the field have little doubt that nowadays the methodology of the discipline should be given special attention. It is of special importance for various aspects of source criticism since all Area Studies are based in some source of data and information. It is becoming more and more relevant in the context of the so-called Digital Turn and its influence on all fields of investigation. In Area Studies, Digital Turn has changed the source database that now includes digital sources. Digital Sources may include both digital versions of classical sources and those sources that do not have any material original version and are digital by nature. It should be stated, however, that the traditional algorithm of source criticism cannot be fully applied to digital sources that are absolutely unique in their nature. The paper deals with the difficulties researchers face while working with digital sources and formulates the objectives of a new applied discipline within Area Studies — Digital Area Studies.

This article dwells upon the functioning of precedent urbanonyms in the English-language mass media discourse and the features of their semantic derivation. The emphasis is put on the analysis of the use of the cognitive mechanism of metonymy to expand the existing meaning of a proper name and to form a new one. The study is based on the material of news articles published in the Reuters news agency in 2022–2023. As a result of the analysis, the main models of the metonymic shift are identified that are used to refocus the meaning of the urbanonym in a certain context. Precedent urbanonyms can be characterized by culturally stable associative characteristics. Their use for the purpose of nominating other objects leads to a shift in focus, semantic derivation of the name, which is not always realized by the recipient, but provides a field for the manipulative use of a proper name, in order to narrow its semantics or impose key characteristics of one conceptual- thematic area to another. Precedent urbanonyms are rarely used in the function of direct nomination in political news texts. They act as a kind of generalized (impersonal) source of information, pointing only to a certain state structure, not to a specific person, that also emphasizes the implementation of the password function of the urbanonym.

The purpose of this article is to present the basics of a systematic integrated approach to the study of the format and genre diversity of modern media speech, designed within the framework of a separate direction of media linguistic research — media textology. The relevance of the development of media textology as an independent direction is due to the rapid diversification of the format and genre structure of the modern media language under the influence of constant improvement of information and communication technologies and the emergence of new multimedia opportunities for the creation and distribution of media content. The theoretical and methodological apparatus of media textology is built on the basis of previous experience in typological description of speech media practices, taking into account the dynamics of media speech, the spread of new forms of media content representation and the peculiarities of its structuring, including the tendency to hybridization and convergence. The key principle of mediatextology is the selection of media texts proper from the set of texts functioning on the Internet, i.e. those that are created by professional journalists for online media and form the basic media content. Unlike other types of network texts created and distributed by individual users on various network platforms for personal purposes, network media texts are produced and distributed on media platforms that have the status of an official mass media.

The article is devoted to the problem of integrating ICT in the process of foreign language teaching in higher education and offers a step-by-step description of the pedagogical approach for developing academic writing skills of undergraduate students of the Faculty of World Politics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. The teaching a foreign language for special purposes to future specialists in international relations presupposes not only mastering a vast corpus of specialist vocabulary but also the ability to write professional texts of different genres. The article describes the experience of using the MOODLE e-learning platform which optimises the teaching of foreign language writing skills through collaborative learning and student-to-student and teacher-to-student interaction. By describing different stages involved in preparation of students’ research report the paper gives practical recommendations on how to organize Internet-based writing activities and use online learning as an additional tool in regular classes. on “Professional Communication in Politics”, specifying a set of tasks and exercises to consolidate writing skills both in-class and self -study hours, using an electronic educational resource MOODLE. The paper concludes that MOODLE platform is an effective resource that offers a powerful set of web-based tools for a flexible array of activities to improve the quality of English language classrooms and enhance students’ learning.

In today’s competence-based paradigm of language education, the priority direction is the development and formation of students’ not only productive foreign language speech skills and language skills that contribute to the creation of written and oral texts of various genres, but also the skills of interaction and mediation in the global digital space. It is possible to develop the above-mentioned skills using effective approaches, methods, technologies. Modern methodological literature presents an extremely wide variety of methodological models, pedagogical theories, specific technologies and approaches to teaching foreign languages. This article is devoted to the development of a general theoretical basis for the hierarchy of existing methods, approaches, methods of teaching foreign languages within the framework of a competent-based, communicatively oriented paradigm of modern education. The proposed hierarchy includes 4 levels, where the theoretical foundation of education is based on a certain psychological and pedagogical theory; the essence of learning activity corresponds to the general theoretical method, the principles of learning — to private methods, the learning process — to a system of tasks. Each level is responsible for a certain range of “didactic potential”. The essence of the lower level is the ways of implementing knowledge, and the up100 per one is the management of information transfer processes in the activity-based model of learning. This system is very important, because the hierarchically organized structure of methods allows instructors to understand how particular methods contribute to the achievement of the goals of teaching foreign languages. The article analyzes the psychological and pedagogical theories valid for the modern system of education — cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism. The typological characteristics are given for the classification of teaching methods, the main types of problem-oriented tasks are identified for the development of students’ foreign language skills.

The article attempts to establish a connection between the linguistic theories of F.F. Fortunatov and A.A. Potebnya. It is known that in nouns that name people and animals important to humans, the grammatical meanings of gender indicate their biological sex. As for the nouns that name inanimate objects, as well as some other animals, their grammatical meanings of gender for quite a long time were estimated by linguists as relics of an ancient form of thinking incomprehensible to modern people. However, if we consider the grammatical meanings of gender as a component of the inner form of the word, it becomes clear that when creating words, the meanings of the masculine gender were used to indicate the presence of such properties in objects that are inherent in male beings, such as their relatively greater activity, larger size, greater strength and greater independence. In turn, feminine grammatical meanings reflected the absence of these properties. The article emphasizes the similarity between the grammatical meanings of gender of nouns and the inner forms of words in their traditional lexicological understanding: (1) in different languages, the names of the same objects can have different grammatical gender meanings, (2) at the time of the appearance of a word, its inner form indicate the connection between the word and its lexical meaning, but over time inner forms can be obscured or lost, (3) like the traditional inner forms, the grammatical meanings of gender can either represent one of the components of the lexical meaning of the word, or may be part of its connotations.

Interdisciplinary research in the field of consciousness and ways of its representation using verbal and nonverbal codes seems to be particularly fruitful at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy, psychology and biology, medicine and neuroscience. Linguistic consciousness is considered in the works of E.S. Kubryakova (2012), R.I. Pavilionis (1983), L.S. Vygodsky (2018), A.N. Leontiev (1975). The information theories of consciousness in philosophy are analyzed in the works of D.A. Fodor (1987), F. Dretske (1981), D.I. Dubrovsky (2015), D. Chalmers (2013). The information theory of consciousness is applied as the basis of the conception of the spiral development of the meaning of a proper name. The concept of onomastic knowledge is analyzed, the conceptual complex structures, which serve as a basis for the mental representations of onomastic knowledge, are given. The concept of onomastic consciousness is introduced as part of the linguistic consciousness responsible for the formation and development of onomastic competence. The definition of onomastic competence is given as the ability to encode information using proper names, both of individualizing and characterizing nature, as well as the ability to manipulate proper names in all variety of systemic and discursive functions to achieve the goal of communication. The analysis of the cognitive-functional specifics of proper names is given on the examples of the novels “Piranesi” by S. Clark and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” by Q. Tarantino. The specifics of the proper name as an objectifier of consciousness and onomastic competence as an indicator of the formation and development of onomastic consciousness are analyzed. According to the information theory of consciousness, onomastic consciousness determines the meaning of proper names.

The paper deals with the feature of verbal and visual semiotic systems peculiar to historical discourse. The relevance of the research is determined by the necessity to identify the correlation of verbal and visual means used by historians in the transmission of information. The methodology of the article is based on the research works of home and foreign scholars. The methods that have been used in the research are: the method of discursive analysis, the method of linguistic analysis, the method of interpretive analysis. As a result of the analysis of historical discourse it has been established that the appeal to various semiotic systems facilitates and streamlines the assimilation of information about the events of the historical past of mankind, preserving the memory of them in the images proposed by the historians. History, which is not given to historians in their immediate experience, is reconstructed by them by means of different semiotic systems. The verbal code reinforced by the visual one sets a certain perception of historical events as they are viewed by historians. In historical discourse, the use of different semiotic systems in the transmission of the most significant historical events is necessary to attract the attention of recipients to them in order to change not only their perception, but also to transform the basic dominants of their mental space, in which the events of the historical past that are not reproduced in experience are reconstructed.

Any interpretation training programme aspiring to excellence must be closely connected with the professional world and make effective use of innovative teaching methods, cooperation with external stakeholders, and modern technologies in order to ensure a high quality of learning. This paper focuses on the different aspects of ‘quality’ in light of the advent of new technologies and the changing nature of the interpreting profession. Interpretation training programmes must learn today how to prepare a widely employable interpreter to survive the pressures of the professional world. A scenario-based approach, that simulates work-like situations, is effective in interpretation training. The paper will focus on mock conferences, as its most effective teaching practice. Mock conferences help to enhance the authenticity and diversity of lifelike situations in class, provide the students with contextualised practice that helps to develop non-linguistic competences. The latest technologies, e.g. ICTs, AI, etc., offer a new degree of automation to all professional language mediation activities, calling for a rethinking of the interpreter’s skillset. The future will accommodate both artificial and human interpreting, and the bar for humans will be raised. The interpretation students must learn how to use the latest technologies for the benefit of the client. A new, augmented interpreter profile includes the combination of the classical competences (interpretation, language and cultural, interpersonal, ethical, etc.) and technological competences which must be used for the benefit of the client and the events at which the interpreter works. The paper also explores the value added by human interpretation to communication, such as depth of message comprehension, teamwork, shared responsibility and liability and, most importantly, the value of the ‘interpreter who cares’.

The article deals with the mechanisms of generation and functioning of spontaneous speech and their influence on the interpreter’s spontaneous speech during simultaneous interpreting. The subject of the research is spontaneous speech in simultaneous interpretation, the object of research is functional notional types of oral speech which serve as the foundation for the algorithm of expressing the main idea of the message. Depending on the functional notional type of spontaneous speech that can be considered as the dominant one in the source message, the interpreter faces different challenges. Following the original message too closely may lead to an abundance of self-corrections, repetitions, slips of the tongue in the interpreter’s spontaneous speech, which, together with confusing syntactic constructions, make it difficult for the audience to understand the target message. Interpreting simultaneously at a higher cognitive level within the model of comparative cognitive transformations, which takes into account algorithms of expressing the main idea, the interpreter can produce a more coherent and smooth spontaneous speech in the target language based on the cognitive essence as a result of thought transformation of the original message. Pragmatic orientation of spontaneous speech predetermines methods of compression as a tool of pragmatic adaptation of the original message within the cognitive pragmatic circle of oral communication, which can be extrapolated to different functional styles of speech and types of discourse.

This article presents a review of the monograph titled “Constructions of Threat in Pre-electoral Discourse. Linguocognitive Analysis of papers and programs of the 2018 presidential campaign” by A.A. Romanov and O.V. Novosyolova. The authors examined different factors related to pre-election communication, such as cognitive-discursive, psycholinguistic, and pragmalinguistic factors. They analyzed representative material and used topical linguistic analysis methods, including Diatone, an automated program for analyzing textual data in pre-election communication. They also examined the emotional-suggestive impact of pre-election programmes. Prof. A.A. Romanov and O.V. Novosyolova’s monograph is topical since it is grounded upon present-day trends of conducting linguistic analysis on the basis of one of the genres of political discourse in a comprehensive manner. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first time such a massive investigation has been completed. The results of the book under study significantly contribute to further development of various linguistic theories, such as pragmalinguistics, speech act theory, functional semantics, communication theory as well as political discourse, cognitive semantics, and communicative-pragmatic constructivism. The practical value of this research is evident in the sphere of political linguistics as well as in teaching courses such as “Topical Issues of Present-day Linguistics”, “Methods of Linguistic Analysis”, “Modern Political Discourse”. It also contributes to integration of new courses into programmes that explore interaction between language and thinking, language and speech, and language and society from a political science perspective.

The academic program of the course is based on the author’s many years of experience in theoretical and field research on ethnic cultures of Russia and in teaching the course “Cultures of the peoples of Russia” to students of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of Moscow State University. The interdisciplinary and comparative approaches served as the theoretical foundation of this course. Thematically, the material is grouped according to the types of cultures of the peoples of Russia: semi-nomadic hunters and fishermen of the north; nomads of the steppes and mountains; settled mountaineers of the Caucasus; settled inhabitants of the plains; diasporas of the peoples of the near abroad, far from their ancestral homelands. To create a comprehensive picture of the studied peoples, the main attention is focused on the continuity of culture in the following way: from autochthonous traditions to modern professional art (ethnic literature, music, painting, and cinema). Different types of ethnic art and literature are regarded in the context of the processes of cultural identification of peoples in the context of globalization.

This article presents a comparative analysis of criticism of conventional academic history, formulated in E. Wolfe’s book “Europe and the People Without History” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”. Critics address positivism, eurocentrism, progressivism, and stadial history, which Chakrabarty refers to as “historicism”. In the first part, the author explains the meaning of Chakrabarty’s concept of “historicism” and summarizes Wolfe’s description of conventional history, which fits in this concept. The second part focuses on the various elements of their criticism. In the third part we present quotes that showcase how both scholars strive to write history outside of the confines of the historicist paradigm.

Foreign languages have always occupied a prominent place in Russia and Russian culture. Despite the apparent isolation from the outside world, Russia has always been closely connected with this world. And not only through obvious trade and political relations, but also by spiritual and cultural ties. The first significant reason for the spread of foreign languages in society was the adoption of Christianity, which brought not only a new faith, but the Greek language along with theological books. The entire subsequent history of the formation and development of the country, all the key historical epochs and events in Russia are in one way or another connected with the problem of the outside world, primarily with the European one — even in those cases, quite frequent in Russian history, when this world was rejected, criticized and was considered a necessary evil, from which it was preferable to fence off with some kind of curtain. Over time, all new foreign languages spread in society, sometimes even entering into conflict: Latin with Greek in the theological field, German with French in the political field, French with English in the literary field. In certain historical periods, for example, in the first half of the 19th century, foreign languages even supplanted the native in a certain social environment and became a reason for unrest regarding the loss of national identity. And sometimes, such as during the Soviet era, these languages were deemed “dead languages”, serving solely as a tribute to tradition and a tool for reading. However, they always retained their important role, opening up new horizons for the Russian people and connecting them with the outside world.

The article explores adaptation as a means of rendering fictional realia. Fictional realia (also known as quasi-realia and irrealia) are understood as a special kind of linguistic realia (culture-specific items) that exist within the genre of speculative fiction. These lexical units describe various aspects of fictional worlds: flora, fauna, everyday life, social and political structure, etc. Adaptation in general is defined as a specific form of intercultural and interlingual mediation that relies heavily on capabilities and necessities of a target audience. Unlike regular translation, adaptation does not necessarily strive to preserve formal and, in some cases, semantic features of the original text. Adaption can be used for different purposes: to make a text more comprehensible to a target audience, to influence a reader in a specific way, etc. When it comes to rendering fictional realia, adaptation can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, it can be defined as adaptation of fictional objects, concepts, and phenomena to reality (when fictional realia are replaced by their real counterparts). And secondly, it can be understood as linguacultural adaptation that is conditioned by cultural and linguistic differences between an original and a target audience. The article primarily focuses on the second type of fictional realia adaptation. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood are used as source material for the study. The article draws connections between fictional realia adaptation and creation of new fictional realia (a means of rendering fictional realia that can be defined as either giving a new name to an existing fictional realia or introduction of a completely new fictional realia).