Articles

The article focuses on the research of the sources, artistic distinctiveness, symbolism and functions of humorous play imagery of Death in Mexican and Mexican-American cultures based on mythology, folklore, music, traditional food, crafts and different forms of mass culture (caricatures, advertisement, internet, puppet installations). The concept of “La Muerte Sonriente” is regarded as a synthesis of the following historical and cultural components: the ancient Mesoamerican tradition of veneration of the Death as a deity and the idea of duality; the traditions of Medieval Europe (carnival forms, the macabre dance and Catholic traditions of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day); the art of J.G. Posada and its development in Mexican folklore. The author comes to the conclusion, that the humorous play imagery of Death being a key “expression of Mexican spirit” has the following functions in Mexican and Chicano cultures: the transmission of the traditional worldview and values, the actualization of family and historical memory, establishing live connection with ancestors, as well as educating, ritual, entertaining, advertising and identity functions. The concept of “La Muerte Sonriente” has a special significance for Mexican-Americans in the process of their ethno-cultural identification, in marking borders of Chicano world in the national culture of the USA and in the actualization of a cultural dialogue with the motherland.

The article is devoted to the gender aspect of literary studies based on the works of the French writer and poetess Christine de Pisan (1364–1430).

The attitude towards “masculine” and “feminine” behavior has dominated for many centuries and has not lost its influence in modern society. The privilege of the patriarchal view in traditional culture also applies to the traditional cultural text. The development of gender studies in the second half of the twentieth century contributed to the interpretation of gender as a discursive phenomenon by its nature. These studies enhanced the differentiation of texts as cultural phenomena into “masculine” and “feminine” types in modern philosophical and cultural studies. The purpose of the study is to identify and explain the features of discursive practices as a reflection of specific female subjectivity. The article analyzes the main features of “masculine” and “feminine” discourse. The concept of “feminine writing” (écriture féminine, H. Cixous’s term), “feminine style of writing” (Derrida’s term) are specified, special attention is paid to the issues of representation and constructiveness of the subject. A specific nature of the discourse on female identity is analyzed using the works of Christina de Pisan as an example, who laid the foundation for the tradition of women’s essays in support of female representatives (“Book of Fortune’s Transformation” (Le Livre de la Mutation de Fortune, 1403); “The Book of the City of Ladies” (Le livre de la Cité des Dames, 1405). The conclusion is made about the interconnection between the intellectual side of women’s identity and the issues of women’s education in this type of discourse, where women’s education is a necessary condition for the transition of women from the role of an object to the role of a subject of culture.

The article examines the Italian commedia dell’arte as one of the components of the cultural heritage of Italy and the theater festival “International Day of Com- media dell’arte” as an information channel for promoting the cultural and historical national heritage of Italy to two addressees - the national and world communities. The article provides a brief description of the theatrical performances of the 2019 festival; it analyzes as well the thematic, dramatic, regional and linguistic specifics of the comedies selected for the event, identifies the main objectives of the festival on the national and international stage. In terms of intercultural communication, the author analyzes the difference in the presentation of the Italian commedia dell’arte in Italy and in foreign countries, respectively, reveals different approaches to positioning cultural and historical heritage depending on the addressee. The article identifies three general tendencies in the positioning of the commedia dell’arte: outside Italy, the classical staging of the commedia dell’arte prevails in order to familiarize foreign audiences with the tradition of the theater of masks; on the territory of Italy on stage they prefer to experiment with traditional scenes from the commedia dell’arte in order to update the historical message of comedy in today’s social realities, as well as to maximally involve young Italians, future carriers of national cultural memory, in the actualization of the historical tradition; workshops for modeling comedy masks should preserve the traditional theatrical tradition, which is on the way of “extinction”, and also serve as an incentive for modern Italians to tactilely experience the comedy del arte as something tangible, material, belonging to them.

In his play created in 2017 Ivan Vyrypaev presents his view of modern Euro- pean society, and specifically of the problems and difficulties that the intelligentsia in Western Europe is experiencing, discussing and trying to solve today. The play is limited to one day of a scientific humanitarian conference taking place in Copenhagen. All actions of the characters are exclusively verbal: they make reports, ask questions, discuss. As a result, a general image of a European intellectual is created on the stage and includes the social status, way of life, relationships within the community, ideology, and worldview. Among the common features of the linguistic construction of the characters, one should mention the frequent use of the pronoun “I”, emotionalism and arguing ad hominem which is not characteristic of scientific discourse. Besides, in the characters’ speech, we have revealed special formulas of politeness, including forms of address, expressions of apology and gratitude and clichés used in scientific presentations and discussions. A distinctive feature is the skillful use of rhetorical devices by all the characters. The high frequency of the words man, life, god, truth, freedom reflects the main topics of the play. The imagological approach used in this study presupposes an interest to the author’s special vision, which obviously reflects the image of a scientific conference on humanitarian issues that a part of the Russian creative intelligentsia has. In addition, it is important to take into account that Ivan Vyrypaev uses this plot to present his philosophical views.

The article describes the role of grammar in the development of new terms and meanings in the English language. As applied to scientific texts in most recognized journals published in 2020, scientific English is shown to differ from General English in that it contains grammatical metaphor that adds weight and authority to the message and functions as a tool for generating new terms and meanings. The article discusses the definition of grammatical metaphor, its place in a sentence and reasons for its use. Grammatically metaphorical discourse with altered word order sounds clear, concise and meaningful. With changes in life and new developments in science due to the pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) there appear new lexical forms in scientific publications that are grammatically metaphorical. As new terms, they get via mass media into General English opening up new horizons in its development.

This article continues the series of publications on the “active” grammar of the Russian language. The grammar of the “active” type, included in the socio-cultural context, makes it possible to identify and describe choice patterns of certain forms of actants depending on the meaning which the speaking (writing) subject aims to express. The research was conducted in the direction from the meaning of the verb to the expression form of its actant positions. This article is devoted to the role identification of the evaluative component of the meaning ‘shame’ of the verbs in the realization of syntagmatic properties within the actant structure. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how the subject’s negative assessment of his actions affects the way of designation of verbal actants. Analysis of the actant structure of ‘shame’ verbs has shown that the evaluative component requires a special arrangement of actants, one of which is the object of evaluation, and the second designates a witness, a real or potential eyewitness to an event unpleasant for the subject. The way these positions are formalized depends on the meaning of the verb, on the characteristics of the objects themselves, and on the value attitudes of the culture. In Russian culture, the “position of responsibility” is understood as a position for a person or a group of persons who occupy a higher position in the social, family or intellectual hierarchy than the subject. The “status” of Russian culture is indirectly reflected in verb syntagmatics.

The article is dedicated to the issue of the participation of the officials and public organizations of Russia in the selection of candidates for education in our country among Montenegrin youth in schools and higher educational institutions. Russian officials were interested in creating a number of specialists in the Slavic lands of the Balkan Peninsula, connected with Russia, who knew and loved Russian culture. Today, such a policy is called “soft power”, and in the XIX and early XX centuries this was a manifestation of pragmatism and strategic calculation in the foreign policy of the empire. Montenegro, which received international recognition after the Berlin Congress of 1878, became a privileged partner and client of Russia. Monarch Nikola Petrovich managed to convince the Russian government that in case of military complications in the Balkans, the Montenegrins would be able to assist Russia in the hostilities. In the last third of the XIX — early XX centuries Russian autocracy paid substantial subsidies to the Montenegrin authorities for the modernization of the state apparatus and the armed forces. Benefits were constantly increased and added up to huge sums. However, the ruler of Montenegro turned out to be an obstinate ward, inclined to forget about the support provided and ignore the political recommendations of the Russian tsar and his entourage. At the beginning of the twentieth century relations between the two countries were strained, and the behavior of Nikola Petrovich often seemed unpredictable. He easily broke his own promises, from time to time he showed a willingness to change Russian patronage for the friendship of Western Europe. Many Russian diplomats and public figures saw a way out of this impasse in preparing as many highly educated specialists as possible for Montenegro, who would join the political elite of the principality and become more reliable allies than the greedy older generation. Moreover, in Montenegro, which had recently switched from a tribal way of life to state life, there was neither a complete secondary school in the European sense, nor higher educational institutions. The calculations of the Russian leadership were only partially justified. However, in this small Balkan country, graduates of Russian educational institutions, sincerely grateful and devoted to Russia, did live and work.

In the second half of the 19th century the Russian Empire engaged in the active process of nation-building. Essential to it was the process of Russification, or the various forms of assimilation of ethnic minorities. This term is one of the controversial and ambiguous concepts in modern historical, social and cultural research. The article suggests a constructive approach to this issue which implies situational analysis of the process of Russification through specifying the conditions and actors of intercultural interaction. The article examines the understanding of Russification as an aspect of the process of Christianization, expressed by several prominent representatives of the Transbaikal and Altai missions. It focuses on the opinion of a Transbaikal missionary Veniamin (Blagonravov), who considered Russification a necessary condition for the success of preaching Christianity. Unlike in the western borderlands of the empire, where Russification took a distinct political and legal turn, in most cases in Siberia it occurred as a spontaneous process carried out through the interaction of the indigenous population with various social groups of the Russian people (artisans, government officials, exiles). Missionaries were among the most significant agents and mediators of the Russian language and culture in the region. At the same time, the conditions of interaction between missionaries and the indigenous population varied in different Siberian regions. The article reveals the differences in the understanding of the need for Russification in the process of Christianization of the local population by the missionaries and highlights the factors influencing the interpretation of the tasks and methods of missionary activity, in particular, the specifics of the local cultural situation, the degree of social organization of the indigenous peoples and the peculiarities of their traditional beliefs.

The turn of the 1920s–1930s is one of the most controversial periods in the history of Soviet culture. There are still many gaps in its study. In particular, the problem of transforming creative and ideological programs of many post-revolutionary art associations remains insufficiently analyzed. The article examines the most influential art organization of the post-revolutionary period — the Association of Artists of Revolution (AKhRR) — taking a more radical stance towards the landscape genre. Initially neutral, this position became extremely critical, even intolerable at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. An analysis of dozens of articles written by the ideologues of AKhRR reveals the ways how new, “revolutionary” criteria for describing and evaluating landscape paintings were developed and how an extensive system of accusations and a set of mandatory requirements for the genre were formed. Landscape was mostly seen as a “reactionary” genre, that made it possible to hide from modern reality, or, on the contrary, to “smuggle” in the Soviet art alien bourgeois values. The changing attitude towards the landscape also makes it possible to trace the transformation of emotional matrix of the era — the refusal to convey complex feelings, that for a long time were perceived as a basic characteristic of Russian landscape painting. The system of denying the landscape, so carefully developed by the members of the Association, was rejected by Soviet culture already in the mid-1930s. However, the events of the turn of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrate how the pictorial genre became a hostage to the movement of culture towards more radical, “leftist” ideological attitudes.

The article is devoted to the experience of polycultural education on the example of the subject “Cultural Parallels of Russian and French Literature” within the master’s program “Russian and French Languages and Cultures”, implemented at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Department of French Language and Culture and Department of Comparative Analysis of Languages. Intercultural interaction as a source of knowledge in the context of teaching a foreign language has become the subject of research by V.I. Fatyushchenko, S.G. Ter-Minasova, A.V. Pavlovskaya, T.Yu. Zagryazkina, J. Duverger, V. Tellier and others. In addition to the polycultural component, the article highlights the perception of Russia and France by Chinese students, studied by an online survey. The questionary showed the following results:

1)           Chinese literature is close to subjects about the “superfluous person”, love, virtue, images of masculine and feminine characters, relationships between generations;

2)           the discussion among master students was caused by questions of infidelity, betrayal, cunning and morality.

This paper critically reflects on the perspectives of developing value- oriented communicative education through co-learned languages and cultures which is designed with the view to the sociocultural context of human existence in a postglobal world burdened with geopolitical confrontation, political and economic conflicts, proxy wars, endless fake information attacks on the individual’s world vision. It gives an insight into the transdisciplinary basis for implementing an axiological approach to value-oriented language-and culture education as an outcome of the author’s transdisciplinary analysis of the Humanities researches and didactic reading of some draft documents related to Russia’s policy on preserving its traditional spiritual and moral values in modern society. It also discusses the purposes of introducing problem-oriented educational environment that may give Russian students an opportunity to master university disciplines in an innovative way in the classroom, and outside the university classroom, to be much involved into public speaking activities on critical issues of modern life and its values, as well as into research cooperation and science promotion in innovative areas of scientific knowledge. The reader’s attention is also drawn to some ways of creating a value-oriented and culture-bound research environment that helps to develop students’ competences needed to be able to act as a promoter of the dialogue of cultures and civilizations in their professional life, able to preserve cultural heritage and counteract modern cultural vandalism, cultural imperialism and cancel culture whenever she or he comes across it.

This is one of a series of essays comparing the treatment of related items in monolingual dictionaries of English, French, and Russian. Previous essays introduced and exemplified the principles of such analysis applied in the articles dealing with the Abrahamic religions and the Crusades.

The article discusses some issues of codification and semantization of language teaching terms in term-fixing texts (specialized dictionaries and reference books). It also describes other texts which involve the type of terms under consideration – term-creating and term-using texts. The paper outlines some key features of the language teaching terms, such as interdisciplinarity, social determinism, etc. The investigation reveals the requirements put forward for terminographic semantics, examines the parameters of the presentation of terms in articles of single and bilingual reference publications, and marks off the types of definitions in term-fixing texts. The research has included detailed analysis of the macro- and microstructure of a new German-Russian reference book of the Goethe-Institute’s innovative program for teachers “Learning to teach German” (German: Deutsch Lehren Lernen), published by the Moscow University Press in 2022. The contribution provides general information about the corpus of the reference book, the subject of codified terms and their formal features, characteristics of the structure and the content of dictionary entries, as well as the principles which were taken into account when describing the concept. Both verbal and nonverbal components are outlined as important terminographic definitional features. These parts of dictionary articles help users better understand the dictionary content of terms represented in the texts of the secondary sphere of use.

Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, questions of nomination are of particular importance. The article dwells upon functioning of toponyms in the English mass media discourse. The central question is the semantic derivation of the toponyms in English-language news of the Reuters news agency. This paper focuses on the main cognitive mechanisms of the formation of a new meaning, such as cognitive metaphor and metonymy, defocusing and profiling schemes. The article investigates the nature of the formation of new meanings and examines approaches proposed by Kubryakova E.S., Iriskhanova O.K., Boldyrev N.N., Babina L.V., Maslova Zh.N., Popova E.A., Ch. Fillmore, R. Lanecker, J. Lakoff. The data of the study consists of 57 examples of precedent toponyms Moscow, Russia, Ukraine, Kiev, Washington, roaches Hungary, Beijing, Britain, Georgia, Kremlin, Turkey, Venezuela that have rich semantics and great potential for the formation of new meanings. These toponyms are also used most frequently in the context of the current political agenda. The toponyms functioning in the English-language news of the Reuters news agency were analyzed for the cognitive mechanism that underlies the formation of the meaning. The findings show that the most productive mechanism of semantic derivation in media discourse is the mechanism of conceptual metonymy.

This study is a continuation of the author’s research of various approaches to the use of metaphor and other expressive language means in texts of English PR discourse (public relations discourse). The aim of the work to reveal the use of the linguistic and pragmatic potential of expressive linguistic units inherent in the texts of the sphere of directed communication, based on the material of the English-language PR discourse, taking into account the PR ends of informing the society and building a certain understanding of the described phenomena. Regarding the stance of attributing metaphor to complex mental mechanisms, public relations councilors resort to their usage to represent new phenomena through the sensory and social experience of a person. The novelty of the study is the conclusion that by using certain polycode language units, PR copywriters get the opportunity to transfer conceptual representations to a process or phenomenon that is difficult to understand, since complex professional texts can be adapted for understanding through similarity and analogy presented in language. The conducted research contributes to discursive studies, as well as to understanding of metaphorical thinking in theory and practice, which can be used in teaching courses in lexicology, phraseology of the English language, as well as for training specialists in the field of communication studies.