Articles

The article studies the issue of borders of European regions. What is the marker for drawing the border – forests, woodlands, arable lands, mountains, coastline or regional culture? Being engaged in the polemics with German social scientist Karl Haushofer the author asserts that culture is the only basis for the definition of regional borders in Europe. Homeland begins with culture. The establishment of the Schengen Area in Europe in the second half of the 20th century did not solve the problem of borders. Firstly, the borders exist in the perception of people even if nobody asks them to show the visa. Secondly, the events at the turn of the 21st century make Europeans reassert control over the borders and the issue of its legality is getting more acute in the political life of Europe. To exemplify, the principality of Liechtenstein has recently appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and demanded that the Czech Republic returns the land confiscated at the end of World War II18. Even the special statement of the head of the Cabinet of the Polish President was necessary in order to allay the international fears that Poland has claims to Belarus where there are political upheavals nowadays19. To put it differently, the issue of borders in Europe is still acute in Europe. In this regard it is especially important to review the issue of the main principles of drawing borders. As a starting point of the discussion the author uses the collection of papers written by Karl Haushofer “Geopolitics”.

The subject of this research is that part of the creative heritage of A.N. Muravyov that has not previously been the subject of study in cultural and philological works, namely, samples of diplomatic materials (letters, official analytical and historical notes). This work is considered in the article as one of the directions of Russian romanticism, in the study of which Russian science has accumulated a lot of experience. The problem of realization of creative potential of the artist in the samples of business writing has not been considered by scholars before, the innovative approach to the problem as presented in the article consists in tracing, for the first time in history, the formation of the stylistic features of official correspondence of Muravyev, revealing the peculiar genre of the nature of these samples of business writing in his work. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time genre and stylistic creative components are considered as the main ones in the implementation of the author’s idea in order to show the spiritual values of the Russian people, to protect the Orthodox presence in the East. The work uses comparative-historical, system-typological, historical-functional methods that allow us to comprehensively consider a complex historical, cultural and literary phenomenon. The results of the work show that in the selected works for analysis (“A note on the salvation of ancient Chersonis”, correspondence with count M.V. Vorontsov-Dashkov from 1847, “Answer to Mr. E. Bore on the question of Holy places”), Muravyov remains within the Orthodox philosophical and religious worldview and romantic aesthetics of the 1820s and 1830s. The relevance of studying the artist’s holistic worldview has increased immeasurably in recent decades, so the results of the research can be used in courses of lectures on cultural studies, Russian classical literature in higher and secondary schools, seminars and practical classes. Russian literature is of interest to all those who are interested in the problems of Russian spirituality, cultural and civilizational features of the Russian world, diplomatic written culture and fiction.

The article focuses on the issues of national identity, which have become exceptionally acute in the era of international cultural globalization. Traditional national food is one of the most important factors that unite nations. With globalization tendencies being intensified there has been a peculiar upsurge of gastronationalism in particular countries and regions as a challenge to the current process of cultural unification. Food frequently becomes not only the most important national stereotype, but also a national unifier for people belonging to one culture. Being of paramount importance in foreigner’s perception of the British and being a national symbol for people living on the British Isles, especially for the English, beef and roast beef have turned into such a national symbol of Great Britain. The article based on a wide range of sources of cultural studies pertaining to a large period from ancient to modern times studies the history of transformation of beef into a national symbol of the English. The author refers to various historical and cultural sources: historical and statistical data, folklore, English memoirs and diaries, travel notes of foreigners about England, fiction literature and images, the print media, cookery books and the Internet. The issue considered is of fundamental importance as a part of regional studies since the issues of identity and the factors of its formation are the key aspects of Area Studies.

The article is devoted to the analysis of communication strategies and tactics in the right-wing populist German discourse of today’s Germany when covering the problem of migration. The aim of the work is to identify the features of the communicative behavior of the representatives of this discourse at the tactical and strategic levels. The relevance of this study is conditioned, on the one hand, by the active development of the current political protest movement in German-speaking countries, as well as the formation of right-wing populist discourse and, on the other hand, by an insufficient degree of study of its communicative characteristics. The work reveals the concepts of communicative strategies and tactics, studies the specifics of the most characteristic strategies and tactics, lexical and grammatical categories. The attention is drawn to the expressiveness and predominantly pejorative connotation of speech means used in the implementation of the identified strategies and tactics, which are illustrated by examples from the texts of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The authors come to the conclusion that the basic strategies of political discourse (self-presentation, struggle for power, retention of power and persuasion) are implemented in the framework of the migration crisis coverage, while only a limited number of tactics are used.

Each language is characterized by a unique set of language-specific means to designate various phenomena of the real world, which characterize a peculiar way of thought and life of a given nation. Japanese key words also give vivid and accurate reflection of the Japanese way of life and thinking and let us reveal the core values of Japanese culture. Key words in question and their analysis help to get insight into and explain the uniqueness of Japanese culture and mentality. Such words are the essential components of the Japanese language worldview. They serve as the eloquent testimony of the cultural worldview, which molds and explains the peculiarities of the culturally determined and unique way of life and thought of the Japanese. Centuries-old and deep-rooted in the Japanese consciousness commitment to form, norm and life regulation, expressed in Japanese in the keyword KATA, functions as an integrating framework of the Japanese consciousness and a key factor of penetrating into the specificity of the Japanese identity. Cultivated over the centuries, the appropriate and the only possible kata-ized way of doing something, and as a result, the only possible pattern of behavior in different situations is not confined to the widely accepted mechanical process of doing something. It is a sort of philosophy of the “Japanese way” in compliance with the norms of the Japanese morality and ethics. This “hidden” knowledge of living “in” or “out” of kata distinguishes the Japanese from other nationalities. The analysis of the key words can be considered as a bright and effective method of penetrating in the nuances of a culture. The knowledge of key words is of vital importance for successful communication with the representatives of another culture, doing business with them as well as for effective teaching international students.

The article gives an analysis of precedent statements from the informative space of political discourse, reflected in different types of media texts. Fulfilling a number of functions in political discourse precedent statements act as an effective means of describing socio-political realia. Moreover, precedent phenomena make the speech more dynamic, convincing, attractive, vivid, and these features influence the addressee, helping him to communicate not only with the speaker, but, following the theory of intertextuality, with the whole cultural context. Analyzing online newspaper media texts dealing with political matters the author comes to the conclusion that in political discourse the most important functions are text-forming, persuasive, evaluative and expressive, which facilitate realization of the global functions of precedent statements - semantic and pragmatic functions. Examples illustrating the changing socio-political realia in conditions of «new normality» and how politicians and journalists react on it make the article timely.

In fact, a mass influx of foreign words, expressions and notions into the native language is a very serious issue. Due to the concern of the public opinion and danger to the Russian language and Russian culture, the growing trend towards borrowing from English is becoming particularly important. Firstly, in post-Soviet Russia the influx of Anglicisms increased sharply. Some authors began copying English terms that had not been commonly used in Soviet scientific literature before. Secondly, it was later, during the Perestroika years, that young people started taking an active interest in Anglo-Americanisms, and Russian calques of English words emerged on the pages of newspapers. Thirdly, many Anglicisms that could be easily dispensed with came into the business community and the language of other professional circles. Fourthly, at a stage of transition from socialism to capitalism, the process of borrowing not only new notions, but also new institutions from Western countries, primarily from the USA, got accelerated. This context raises an issue of the need for adopting a reasonable state policy to protect the Russian language not only from contamination, but also from introducing meanings that are alien to Russian national interests. However, there is also another point of view. In some specialists’ opinion, there are more positive changes occurring in the Russian language than negative ones. The language keeps developing vigorously and becoming more emotional, with an active process of enriching the vocabulary of the Russian language currently underway. Thus, wouldn’t it probably be more reasonable to be guided by the economic principle laissez-faire with regard to the language?

The paper focuses on the cognitive metaphor as part of W.S. Churchill’s conceptual sphere. Metaphor is known to be one of the most powerful and frequent means of influencing the audience used by political leaders. It performs various functions in political communication, the main of which is cognitive, which consists in describing something new, complex, and / or abstract through simpler and more concrete images. The cognitive analysis allows for applying a broad approach to the material concerned. Thus, not only are metaphors, including those extended, studied, but metaphorical epithets, metonymies, periphrases, etc. are as well. Special emphasis is placed on the source domains and target domains of the metaphors analyzed. The paper addresses some of the eight key concepts explicated by the cognitive metaphor, which were identified as a result of a continuous sampling method used to analyze the politician’s pre-war speeches. The author concludes by stressing the key role of the cognitive metaphor in modeling the individual conceptual sphere. The data analysis is supported by a profound literature review covering fundamental works in the field of the theory of conceptual metaphor, concept study, and conceptual sphere.

Deontic modality is a modality of motivation for action, for compliance with certain laws, requirements and norms. It can be expressed in the form of an order / appeal, prescription, instruction, request, recommendation, permission, persuasion, reasoning, etc. The aim of the study is to show how the genre of the text can influence the choice of explicit and implicit means and ways of expressing this type of modality in the German language, which is realized during a specific discursive practice. Popular science, legal and literary texts became our empirical material. Particular attention was paid here to the phenomenon of isomorphism of modal verbs as markers of various situations of deontic modality. Isomorphism in this case is understood as the uniformity of the ways of expressing modal shades of an utterance in different linguistic forms. Due to this characteristic of German modal verbs, which are combined into one group, primarily based on the commonality of their etymological roots, the same verb can be a marker of different situations of deontic modality, which the article shows in the use of the verb können as an example.

Proper names serve different linguistic functions, ranging from basic – cognitive and communicative to affective, identifying, evaluative, password, pragmatic, characterizing, expressive, appellative, iconic, implicative, index, individualizing functions, in which they display their full potential. The functional repertoire of onomastic units is aimed at distinguishing a subject or object from similar ones, to give it a direct or indirect characteristic, to convey some information and evaluate. Proper names, once created by the author of a particular work, are often used in other texts, acting as allusions, thereby expanding the interpretive potential of onyms. The anthroponym represents a hero already created by another author, and for the perception of the novel it is necessary to know the prehistory. In modern culture, we often see a personal name going “beyond its borders” when it “jumps” from the pages of books onto movie screens, store windows, product labels, advertising billboards, etc. The name expands its information potential and the possibility of interpreting its culturally marked and semantic component. Now we see not only the continuation of the storylines or the usage of the name outside the original context, but also the mixing of spaces of different texts in one, within which all characters are allusive and to understand the storyline of such “patchwork” works requires a certain background knowledge of the recipient. In such works, the proper name not only realizes the individualizing, cognitive, communicative and other functions listed above, but also appears in a new representative function. This function is analyzed in the article in the series “Once Upon A Time”.

The paper pursued the aim to model linguistic picture of the world, relying on the frequency of the lexis in the Russian, English, and Turkish languages, established by the proprietary methodology of quantitative analysis of the Voronezh School of Applied Linguistics. The nuclear vocabulary, identified through several linguistic criteria, was included in the smaller parametric kernels and studied in this paper in the context of the linguistic picture of the world. A comparative method was applied to reveal general features and specific differences in the world pictures of the three languages. The result of the analysis found out that the nuclear vocabulary of each language, selected on the basis of linguistic-statistical grounds, provided a definite idea of the basic views of the linguistic community towards the world. The results of comparison of the lexical world pictures revealed that the smaller parametric kernels of the three (Russian, English, and Turkish) languages actualized both general spheres of cognitive interpretation of the world and specific spheres of knowledge. The coincidences of many fragments in the lexical world pictures proved that there were universal fundamentals in the life of the peoples. Whereas discrepancies in the given linguistic world pictures dealt with a specific mental-linguistic interpretation in the aspect of the internal detailing of the cognitive-semantic blocks as the fragments of the linguistic world picture (LWP). The discrepancies originate from the way a person sees himself/herself, his/her nature, his/her preference for particular types of physical activity, the ways how he/she evaluates the environment, the level of how he/she actualizes abstract concepts, and processes of mental activity, as well as the choice of objects of the tangible world, etc. The picture of the world of each language represents a basic model of the world perception of the native speakers of the Russian, English, and Turkish languages.

The aim of the present paper is to focus on identifying the main cognitive mechanisms in the mental world by which the human consciousness and traditional classical myths are renovated as motivated by the contextual factors and underlying modern technologies. Through a frame/slot analysis of the modern text/discourse we draw attention to the way in which the most typical intertextual properties of the renovated myths are represented. They are as follows: 1) the division of input spaces and their quantity number; 2) the semantic intertextuality; 3) the formal (structural) interteхtuality; 4) the allusive intertextuality; 5) the memetic intertextuality. We conclude that the archetypal myth strategies in the modern text/discourse can be renovated by two means: 1) remythologisation (that is, exploration and usage of the traditional archaic plot, narration, a literary bookish stylistic register, names, structural arrangement, semantic meanings in the new context); 2) demythologisation (that is, negative or ironical attitude to the main gods, titans and heroes; non-formal stylistic register; a low-level pathos; the modern plot and social context). All these properties transfer the archaic myth into the new semiotic unit, able to be functioning in the new social and temporary situation and communicating with the new generation of the 21st century.

The present paper deals with some aspects connected with the selection of the translation strategies represented in different Bible versions. The view according to which the piety towards the sacred content of the Holy Writ and the danger of its possible distortion stimulated the tradition of the literal translation and led quite often to the literality, archaization, etc., is widely spread among the specialists, although at the same time the great role of the Bible translations as the means of the formation and development of the many literary languages is also recognized. On the other hand, besides the pure linguistic aspect as such, the strategy of the different Bible translators could also touch the substantial part of the original due to different pragmatic reasons. This is particularly evident in so-called ‘modern translations’. This process has been influenced by the appearance of the new translation theories. In turn, ‘pragmatics’ itself may have a different character and be related with different sides of the text: from the methods of the representation of the so-called cultural words (‘realia’) to the interpretation consistent with the norms and principles accepted by the translation organizers and the target audience.

This article aims at analyzing some ways of providing effective feedback and organizing reflective activities in online learning of foreign languages. Feedback and reflection make it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the work of students, the effectiveness and efficiency of the educational strategies and tasks used, make it possible to build an individual student’s route to overcome difficulties, compensate for errors and improve learning outcomes. The concept of feedback and reflection is considered as a mechanism for increasing student motivation, it helps create an interactive educational online environment, regulating and adjusting the learning process. The authors analyze the didactic potential of digital tools and mobile tools used to develop reflexive and communicative skills of students, provide some practical tips on organizing reflexive activity in online classes, highlight the stages of reflexive activity, the prerequisites for providing effective feedback. The didactic potential of digital tools allows educators to provide quick, targeted and timely feedback, to organize reflection, to introduce the elements of gamification into the educational process, to save the results of polls and votes, to conduct an effective analysis of positive and negative results, on the basis of which the teacher can make changes in his own pedagogical activity, and in the educational activity of students.

Telecollaboration is known to have several forms. This article concentrates on teletandem, i.e. tandem realised via telecommunications. Tandem method of learning languages means mutual free exchange of language knowledge: two native speakers agree between themselves to teach each other their mother tongues. In the course of their tandem interaction they constantly rotate their functions of teacher and learner. Their collaboration is absolutely autonomous: they are independent of any institution and free of any financial obligation to each other. They are equal and equally interested in successful learning their partner’s language (principles of reciprocity and parity of languages). MSU (Russia) and VCU (USA) adapted the initial tandem method to enhance their students’ compulsory/mandatory foreign language learning (English and Russian, accordingly) under their curriculum. The tandem-partners communicate via ICT (t-Tandem). Free independent tandem is transformed into institutional (i.e. included into the students’ curricula as an elective learning activity). The autonomy of tandem learning is preserved but in a slightly restricted way due to the necessity to evaluate its successfulness. A suitable for both sides structure of teletandem was worked out, which includes three stages: an introductory videoconference for MSU and VCU students’ acquaintance and making tandems; task-based autonomous learning in tandems resulting in the preparation of Power Point presentations on a developed theme and a final wrap-up videoconference with students’ showing their presentation for common discussion. The survey conducted among the students on their completing the project resulted in valuable observation, which made it possible to identify positive and negative factors in project implementation and outline the prospects for its improvement.