Articles

The cultural space of any country, region or city is an open book, a special text, the “reading” of which is an exciting and important professional occupation for a linguist, geographer, culturologist. Indeed, it holds, and for novice researchers withholds, deep layers of history and culture. At the same time, the history of a city or country, expressed in monuments and toponyms, always carries symbolic connotations. A monument commemorating the fallen soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, even if it does not possess high artistic merit, is a symbol of the victory of our people over the dark forces. Thus, the massive destruction of monuments to Soviet heroes in Eastern Europe means not only the erasure of an important layer of collective memory, but also – symbolically – the rehabilitation of Nazism. This work is devoted to the analysis of changes in the geocultural space during 2015–2020 in The Southern United States in relation to new interpretations of Confederate cultural heritage.

This article deals with the issues related to the preservation of traditional culture in times of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Today the world is mostly concerned about the biological aspects of the problem: when the pandemic will end, what the consequences will be, and how many people will survive. Another aspect that is given prominence is the economic effects, which for many nations are also connected with the issues of survival, prospects of massive impoverishment, unemployment and famine. Next on the scale of modern values comes the political dimension of the problem: not all country leaders and political systems have stood the test of a serious crisis. Finally, at the bottom of the list are cultural issues, “culture” understood in a broad sense as a way of life, traditions, mentality, communication patterns (both at the local and international level) of the world’s different peoples. Clearly, the crisis of “culture” does not immediately provoke any tragic outcomes – death, famine, disease – but it has far-reaching, delayed consequences, which, in a sense, are no less disastrous than biological, economic or political ones. These issues are discussed in this article.

The article examines the color values of the French language through the prism of gender issues and the processes taking place in the modern French society. The gender semantics of color designations is studied from the point of view of biological and socio-cultural characteristics of men and women, as well as taking into account marketing communications aimed at creating “male” and “female” color names for consumer goods. Cultural and social changes are reflected in the color category, in particular, in the gender semantics of the color of everyday goods. The article analyzes the color nominations of cosmetics and cars from the point of view of gender stereotypes that are introduced into the minds of consumers according to sociocultural norms that determine the psychological qualities, behaviors and activities of a person. Marketers and designers use gender differences when nominating a new color shade of a product in order to maximize its compliance with the value priorities of the consumer, which are changing in the context of globalization and reducing the differentiation of the social roles of men and women. In order to interpret the gender semantics of color values, the article presents the results of a free associative psycholinguistic experiment, during which the presence of values was recorded, both coinciding in the representation of men and women, and demonstrating the features of associative fields in conceptual pictures of the world.

The author examines compositional and stylistic features of law-related posts as a cross-genre of popular legal discourse, functioning in a virtual setting. Posts comprise hybridity of different types and levels. The combination of verbal and non-verbal elements makes posts polycode and enhances the impact of the online media text on the target audience. Legal terms and professional expressions are implanted into the texts of posts (linear hybridization). Much attention is given to multiple intertextual connections, represented by the use of allusions and cross-genre inclusions. Elements of institutional and personal discourse are intertwined, which is characteristic of virtual discourse. A mention is made of verbal indicators of popular legal discourse, which enables the reader/listener to easily identify and typologize the communicative situation as law-related. A wide variety of figurative and evaluative tools (emotionally colored words, fashionable words, metaphors, rhetorical questions, etc.) is employed by text authors to make a profound emotional impact on the target audience. The main goal of the articles of the post genre which belongs to computer-mediated popular legal discourse is to popularize the law and convince the audience to follow its norms, which determines the choice of appropriate discourse strategies and tactics.

The article deals with the issue of the British pronunciation norm and the changes in it in the course of the last few decades. Both segmental and suprasegmental features of phonation are considered with the aim of describing the most noticeable phenomena that characterize Standard Southern British as the norm of today and distinguish it from Received Pronunciation as the norm of the past. A comparative study of several pronouncing dictionaries starting from the earliest one published at the end of the 19th century to the latest one has made it possible to verify the changes in the phonemic as well as the phonetic composition of words. A large corpus of authentic recorded speech has been subjected to analysis through the prism of observations made by British phoneticians concerning the recent changes in the articulation of vowels and consonants. A few most obvious changes in the pitch movement of British English have been commented upon as their influence on the Russian language is impossible to ignore. No less important was the issue of the system of terminology used when describing the British pronunciation standard: as it reflects the changing nature of the norm, its overview helped to clarify the nature of the changes themselves.

The paper focuses on “kaleidoscopic” concepts, which are defined by A.P. Babushkin as cognitive structures that take different forms under the same verbal “skin”. The core of the research is the question raised by the author about the pos- sibility of “kaleidoscopic” performance being a feature not exclusively found in the concepts “captured” by abstract words. The idea that the concepts verbalized by concrete words can also be “kaleidoscopic” is investigated through a study of the concept TIGER, as actualized in the discourse space of the novel “When You Trap a Tiger” (2020) by Tae Keller, a young Korean-American children’s writer. The author presents a series of examples from the novel showing how cognitive structures of different kinds (e.g. mental pictures, frames, scenarios, schemes) are verbalized by one and the same concrete word, that is the name of the concept TIGER. For each case the type of the “kaleidoscopic” concept is defined, and the cognitive processes (i.e. profiling, conceptual metaphor, perspectivization, symbolization) activating the “shapeshifting” performance of the concept are described. Furthermore, using the data on the nucleus and peripheral areas of the concept in question, as presented in definitions of the key word tiger in several of the most authoritative dictionaries of English, the author formulates the principle of categorization of “kaleidoscopic” concepts that are verbalized by concrete words. It is deemed important that the above-mentioned principle is essentially different from the one pertaining to “kaleidoscopic” concepts named by abstract words.

A comparison of the treatment of three culturally significant concepts, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, in dictionaries of several languages, in the hope of learning about dictionaries and the dictionarate cultures that produce and use them – and in order to encourage my colleagues to undertake such comparisons.

At the beginning of this century, which is known as the century of globalization, learning a foreign language is inevitable. Therefore, almost a large part of society partly have to deal with foreign languages. Learning a foreign language is associated with many problems. Not only grammatical and lexical problem in both languages, but also the phonetic system in all their aspects such as acoustic and articulation characteristics, accent, intonation and stress. Such problems should be solved in order to realize the main purpose of the education, which means communicativeness with maximum approximation to the original language. The experiment was aimed at improving the acoustic and pronunciation skills of Persian-speaking students. The purpose of the analysis is to eliminate the interfering influence of phonetic phenomena of the native language on the target language as well as to correct and improve students’ pronunciation and using special instrumentation techniques bring it closer to the normative pronunciation of modern Russian literary language. The results of this study show that mistakes in pronouncing consonants depend directly on the characteristics of the consonant systems of the Russian and Persian languages. A comparison of articulatory movements of speech organs involved in the production of speech (both active and passive) of Persian and Russian fricative consonants revealed the fact that there is no similarity between them.

Auditory speech perception is the most important type of human speech activity carried out in the process of language existence. What cognitive procedures does a person use when moving from a chain of sounds to the meaning of a message? What units are created by a complex interaction of lexical-grammatical and phonetic means? Segmentation of the speech flow is now the focus of linguists working with orally generated speech (hereinafter-UPR). The segmentation basis is recognized as semantic predicates of N.I. Zhinkin, clause of W. Cheif, syntagma of L.V. Shcherba, accent-melodic pattern, prosodic breaks. It is known that the study of UPR is impossible without spelling fixation, the creation of which turns the sounding substance into a graphic one, and the process into a product. The methods of creating transcription, as well as the methods of using it, depend on the task set in the study. The article presents segmentation performed in three modes: auditory analysis without visual transcription support, auditory analysis with transcription support, and transcription analysis without sound support. The obtained results indicate that the main unit of UPR reliably isolated from the sound continuum is the phonation period, segmented on the basis of two perceptual-auditory features: the tonal design of the terminal syllable and the phonation break.

Switzerland’s multilingualism is a rich material for geopolitical, regional studies, (socio) linguistic research. In particular, the notion of the border between the areas of the French and German languages, called “Röstigraben”, is a phenomenon that has been superficially covered in domestic and foreign literature. The article shows how “Röstigraben” is used in the French-speaking press in Switzerland, what image it has and for what purpose the French-speaking population of the country use this term.

The term “Röstigraben” means “Rösti foss”, where “Rösti” is a potato dish native to Bern, the German-speaking canton of Switzerland. Overcoming the boundaries of the German area “Röstigraben” is used by the Swiss people to ironically denote the border between French-speaking and German-speaking areas in the context of culture and language. “Röstigraben” is used by the Swiss people to ironically denote the border between French-speaking and German-speaking areas in the context of culture and language. However, the expansion of the meaning of the concept under study indicates that the “Röstigraben” also has political, economic and social components. “Röstigraben” is a popular lexeme in the French-speaking media in Switzerland, and in the process of semantic derivation it undergoes some changes, preserving the archiseme “border” and acquiring the additional meaning of “difference”.

The article aims to analyze the word and the concept of mobilité / mobility in the language education discourse. This question is part of the broader issues related to the study of “discourse of modernity” and its markers – keywords, images, metaphors, reflecting the processes of globalization and glocalization which take place in society. The article shows that the field of teaching foreign languages is included in the streams, that M. Bernardo designated by the triad of keywords: mobility (mobilité), hybridity (hybridité), fluidity (liquidité). Meanwhile, this sphere is a special “territory” of culture because of the exclusive development of the term and concept of mobility / mobilité, as well as a complex of related lexemes that form a connotative knot: motilité – mobilizer – motiver – motivation. The subjects of mobility in this area are a foreign student / étudiant international and their teacher. Taking into consideration the works of Russian, French and Quebec authors, we conducted our own survey of teachers and master program students from China working under the program “Russian and French languages and cultures”. The parameters of mobility, the peculiarities of its perception as social capital are identified, and the assessment of its results as a social imperative and the main condition for the formation of the “third area” formed during the socialization of a person in a foreign language is given.

The objective of this action research is twofold, first, to work out the possible ways of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) integration in a blended CLIL course and to analyze the pedagogical impact of this intervention on developing student language and collaboration skills. The theoretical framework of the intervention is based on current MOOC theories, connectivism (G. Siemens, 2005) and SAMR model by R. Puentedura (2011) for implementing new technologies and open educational resources into teaching. Thirty bachelor students from Lomonosov Moscow State University enrolled in a blended course Methodology of English Language Teaching participated in the first cycle of the research. Student participation in the MOOC Understanding language: Learning and Teaching (Southampton University, UK) was evaluated using two assignments: the e-portfolios that reflected their participation in the MOOC forums and the course blog peer collaboration where they could comment on each other’s contributions and experience. The analysis based on the qualitative and quantitative data (post-intervention questionnaire) demonstrated the learners’ positive attitude to this intervention due to the following possibilities: getting familiar with the theories and terminology on EFL teaching and learning, sharing ideas and experiences on the MOOC forums with the learners from all over the world, and finally, improving their writing skills, digital literacies and EFL terminology knowledge.