Articles

The article examines a new phenomenon within the international political discourse, namely diplomatic discourse and its sub-type Deal Diplomacy. This phenomenon is analyzed from the linguistic and cultural perspectives, which take into account the peculiarities of the worldview of Russian- and English-speaking societies. The relevance of the study is dictated by the need for comprehensive awareness of a new phenomenon within the framework of international cooperation. As a practical discipline, intercultural communication is a tool to increase understanding among people of different nationalities, enhance cooperation, and minimize conflict. The novelty of this research lies in a semantic approach to the term “Deal Diplomacy”. The methods used to conduct the study include analysis and synthesis, the method of continuous sampling and philological analysis, the method of lexicographic definitions, as well as the comparative method, which contributed to the comprehensive consideration of this discourse. The results of the study show the feasibility of using the term deal diplomacy within the framework of diplomatic discourse, which has special characteristics from different linguocultural perspectives.

The evolution of proper names references of foreign culture plays an important role in the processes of intercultural communication. In the early stages of interlanguage and intercultural interaction, referents of different onomastic fields may be assigned the same name, which results in issues with the identification and localization of objects in space. The purpose of this article is to study the phenomena of multiple reference and its evolution using the example of the Russian onyms Saint-Nicolas (Saint Nicholas) and Saint-Michel-l’Archange (Saint Michael the Archangel) in the texts of French travelers of the XVI–XVIII centuries. Taking into account the works of A.V. Superanskaya, V.A. Nikonov, T.Ju. Zagrjazkina, M.-N. Gari-Prieur an analysis of the meanings of these Russian onyms in Francophone discourse is carried out. It was concluded that the most full-fledged multiple reference is presented in the text of the XVI century, when the French were just beginning to explore the Russian space: each name has four referents. There is a broadening and narrowing of the references of the synonyms Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Michel-l’Archange from text to text. The development of references shows the relationship between the distribution of the main and secondary meanings of the onym and the role that its referent played in the eyes of the author, for example, the role of the port-customs of St. Nicholas becomes less significant, and the frequency of use of Saint-Nicolas as a toponym decreases as it falls out of use. The meaning of the hagioanthroponym “Saint Nicholas” appears and becomes the most frequent.

This article is devoted to the study of digital discourse using the example of the communication of the online community “Warum бы и nicht” on the VKontakte platform and in the Telegram channel. The research is based on modern approaches to the study of digital discourse, including the analysis of computer-mediated discourse. It also examines the theory of code switching and its implementation in the digital format. The article identifies and analyzes the functions of the German-language component in the community’s posts, examines the phenomenon of code switching and its parameters, and explores the specifics of communication within the digital community on the two specified platforms. The article describes the structural features of the inclusion of German words in Russian-language posts, identifies the themes of the messages, and analyzes the texts of posters, posts, and comments. Special attention is given to the representation of German culture in the community’s posts. The use of two languages within the same community is a marker of its intercultural orientation, but the presence of two languages in a single message is not always a manifestation of code-switching. The use of German for a predominantly Russian-speaking audience can be used to attract attention, construct historical identity, and promote a specific cultural identity.

The article discusses contradictory tendencies as observed in Singapore English: first, the trend to language standardization caused by linguistic globalization, which is opposed to the drive to express local identity and which is implemented via the form of Singapore Spoken English, aka Singlish that reveals notable deviations from Standardized Written English; second, the linguistic strive to stockpile huge data bases as language corpora that may include rather laconic speech forms, such as SMS. The subject matter of this research is SMS written in Singapore English and maintained in the NUS (National University of Singapore) Corpus. The object of the research is focused on the dynamics of the SMS language compared in two cross-sections — of 2004 and 2012 periods. The first section revealed Singaporean’s drive to use Singlish that expresses Singaporean identity; the second cross-section made it more noticeable the results of the government campaign for standardizing Singapore English. The research employed comparative, corpus-based, and frequency analysis methodologies. The findings revealed lexical items originating from indigenous languages (Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) spoken by Singapore’s population; the preservation of such terms within English-language discourse proves to be a crucial aspect for local inhabitants in articulating their national identity and self-consciousness.

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of changes in approaches to monitoring and assessing language proficiency from the advent of the first computers to the introduction of modern generative artificial intelligence models. The study aimed to trace the historical evolution of intelligent assessment systems, conduct a comparative analysis of existing solutions, identify ways to integrate AI into language education, and assess prospects for further development in this field. Particular attention is paid to automatic written text assessment systems, the stages of their integration into learning, and intelligent adaptive testing platforms capable of personalizing assignments to the level and needs of students. The study’ s results demonstrate that modern intelligent systems significantly expand the capabilities of teachers and students, providing more accurate and rapid assessment of written assignments and facilitating the development of individual educational trajectories. The integration of generative models into testing systems opens up new prospects for language education but requires a rethinking of the role of the teacher, improved methods and ethical standards, and training of specialists capable of effectively using AI tools in educational practice.

The formation of fiction is determined by the cognitive-pragmatic specificity of the frames-scenarios that constitute the dominants of the semantic space of a literary text. The fictional reality modelled by the author has a fictional nature, while fiction is interpreted as a “construction” of a possible reality. The article focuses on the substantiation of the cognitive-pragmatic status of the frame-scenario in the formation and functioning of fiction. Based on the material of micro- and macro-contexts taken from the text of J. Fowles’s novel “The Magus” (1965) (in the original and translated into Russian by B.N. Kuzminsky), the functioning of the frame-scenario Game as a constituent of the semantic space of the fictional text is parameterized. It is done within the coordinates of the literary reality and the fantasy world that prove to be fictional in the cognitive-semantic nature. The research methods form a holistic complex in application to the material, the priority ones are the observation method, the deductive-inductive method, the comparison and contrast method, the linguistic modelling method, the frame and cognitive-semantic analysis, and the philological interpretation. The study established that the development of events in the text of the novel “The Magus” constitutes a conflict between the scenario based on the stereotyping of the situation and the frame-scenario, which is aimed at deconstructing multi-level stereotypes. Literary reality and the fantasy world in the parameters of fiction are delimited from each other in a specific physical space. The objectification of the fundamental unreality of the literary text occurs through the frame-scenario Game, since it constitutes literary fiction not only in spatio-temporal coordinates or subject features that are deconstructed by the character and the reader, but also within the framework of their logical conclusions, for which the semantic resource of comparative constructions and metaphors is involved.

The paper presents an address as one of the forms of speech behavior in the regulated spheres of communication. Regulated communication standards of speech etiquette. The trends in the most typical forms of address are identified on the basis of the observation over the surveys of preferable choices of the different forms of address, such as the following:

1. Address as a regulator of speech behavior in the public communicative

situation.

2. Address as a regulator of speech behavior in an aspect of a literary text.

3. Address as an effective means of implicit literary text decoding.

4. Address as a deviation from the regulated speech behavior and a source

of the new knowledge.

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.