Articles

The paper deals with the issue of decoding and functional characteristics of such stylistic device as pun or play of words in a literary text, paying special attention to one of its main subdivisions — paronymic attraction. On the extensive linguistic material (more than 600 pages) the most important decoding stylistic functions of this phenomenon (such as evaluative, expressive, characterizing, etc.) have been identifi ed, and the initial hypothesis that paronymic attraction may be closely tied up with all the language system levels, not only phonetic, has been proved. Besides that, the role of communicative, informative and expressive functioning of this stylistic device was established not only in the humouristic literary texts, but in the most serious political discourses as well.

The article discusses the concept of cultural transmission. The language is considered as one of the tools for the transmission of values from one generation to another. The work is based on the materials of dictionaries and the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The research confi rms the thesis about the existence of fundamental culture codes, which manage its language and perception schemes. Understanding the signifi cance of cultural codes makes it possible to form and develop a national cultural identity, which contributes to the implementation of cultural transmission. Special attention is paid to identifying linguistic areas of concentration of cultural meanings. In the course of the study, it was found out that the internal form of the word and evaluative vocabulary open up great opportunities for establishing cultural-specifi c meanings hidden from direct observation. The meanings of words containing a subjective component allow us to formulate some laws of “naive” ethics. The use of words with evaluative semantics indicates the moral rules of the society or reveals their violation. The article also shows how values are refl ected in the formation of the ethnic style of communication. This work is deeply connected with such topical questions as the national and cultural specifi city of connotations, the means of their lexicographical representation, the decoding of speaker’s value system.

The article deals with the direction in linguistics focused on the description of the language for productive and receptive speech actions. The developer of this direction, Igor G. Miloslavskiy, proves in his writings that the classification approach is clearly insufficient to describe in full the language understood as activity. Orientation to the reflection of reality and to the understanding of speech activity as a set of receptive and productive actions lead to the understanding that language serves to ensure speaking / writing and understanding when listening and reading. Different initial data (meaning and text) require that the grammars intended for reception and production should have fundamental differences. The speaker/writer’s goal is (ideally) to strive to make an accurate choice of language units and ways of connecting them that correspond to his intention. For a person reading / listening, the most important task is to extract complete and accurate content from lexical and phraseological units in the process of listening or reading, as well as distinguishing between objective and subjective meanings contained in the statement. As convincingly, showed Miloslavskiy, the activity approach to the language, demanded by life and society, is able to ensure the effective development of the linguistics of the future. The article presents a brief review of the works of Igor G. Miloslavskiy and the main stages of his scientific and pedagogical activity, strongly associated with the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Phraseological units are central to developing communicative competence, which is viewed as the main goal of teaching modern languages. They contribute to making our speech more figurative, expressive, and convey additional emotional, evaluative and pragmatic connotations, which determines an effective interaction with native speakers. In addition to the usual use, phraseological units are often subjected to individual semantic-structural transformations, which, in particular, are typical of newspaper texts. Acquiring the skills of using phraseological units, especially with transformations, is of particular difficulty for language learners, since this contradicts the perception of these units as ready-made and permanent in terms of structure and lexical components. Accordingly, this requires a deep understanding of their connotative, pragmatic, emotional-expressive and evaluative characteristics responsible for the transformations made. This calls for a methodically adequate presentation and the choice of practical tasks so that international students may use the expressions concerned in the proper form. The paper examines the common challenges that international students face when studying Russian phraseology. It also briefly reviews the types of transformations, and provides the author’s recommendations related to incorporating phraseological expressions, including the ones with transformations, in the learning process.

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.