Articles

The article addresses the issue of developing foreign language teachers in the field of artificial intelligence integration. Artificial intelligence is part of the IT tradition and has significant potential to change the educational process, for example doing routine activities or giving feedback to students. Artificial intelligence technologies such as speech and text generation, machine translation, linguistic corpora, etc. are used in foreign language teaching. However, some studies show that only a small part of teachers are ready and willing to use artificial intelligence in their teaching practices. 

To raise awareness about the didactic potential of artificial intelligence, a special teacher training course was developed at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of Moscow State University in 2023. The main goal of the course “Pre-trained generative neural networks in foreign language teaching” is to develop professional methodological competence and practical skills for working with intelligent learning systems. During the course, currently used artificial intelligence technologies are analyzed. 

151 teachers from different regions of Russia took part in the course, after which some of them took a survey about their attitude towards educational material. Respondents appreciated the theoretical foundation and practical skills for giving presentations, evaluating student work, and more.

The article discusses cognitive metaphors as one of the ways to verbalize human emotions. The relevance of the study of the emotive component is due to its multidimensionality and the immanent presence of emotions in the structure of language, consciousness and thinking. Emotions underlie human activity and are closely related to cognitive processes. Th e vocabulary of emotions is a reflection and way of expressing various emotional states, forming a person’s individual lexicon. Since emotive vocabulary does not have clear semantic boundaries, almost all lexemes can become emotives in a certain communicative situation. The blurring of the boundaries of the emotive field results in the appearance of many secondary nominations of emotions formed with the help of metaphorical transfers. Cognitive metaphor, conveying human emotions and combining sensory and rational components, creates a special layer of means of expressing emotional states in a language. In the process of metaphorization, concepts from various conceptual spheres interact, because of a categorical shift, new images and meanings are created with the effect of emotional tension. In order to study cognitive metaphor in the context of emotiveness, the article examines the interaction of various conceptual spheres of the French language, drawing on the material from political articles, interviews, advertising products and fiction. It is established that because of the integration of different concepts, not only an emotional assessment of the facts of reality is formed, but also an impact on public consciousness is exerted through the stylistics of language and emotive vocabulary, characterized by a wide verbal representation and semantic diversity.

The focus of the present paper is on “Metis futurism” as a conceptual framework that allows writers to actualize, construct and reimagine personal, cultural and other types of identity in and through fiction. Characteristics of “Metis futurism” as postulated by Ch. Vowell, a Canadian Metis writer, are examined through a study of her short story collection “Buffalo Is the New Buffalo” (2022) accompanied by the writer’s commentaries. The aim is to outline the key extralinguistic and linguistic aspects of Metis futurism as exemplified by Ch. Vowell’s fiction, as well as to analyze the function of the metaconcept in question within the author’s idioconceptual subsystem. 

The results obtained show that given the hybridity of genres, postcolonial speculative rhetoric, a set of culture-specific concepts relevant for the Metis people and other Indigenous cultures, alongside the extensive use of the speech strategy of discredit and non-English language means that the target audience is supposed to decode on its own, “Metis futurism” allows the writer to personalize and customize the format and the content of their fiction in accordance with their goal of inviting the audience to participate in the (re)construction of all kinds of identity in and through text, thereby performing its interpretive function.

In modern linguistics, many disciplines offer their methodologies for comprehending meanings in the process of communication, but none of them provides more or less clear parameters for their identification and assessment of the interaction levels between the elements within a completed work. 

The aim of this paper is to develop a hierarchy of semantic-syntactical bonds that can be applied in timbral analysis of a text, minimizing the degree of subjectivity in the study of a work. Using the term ‘text energy’, the authors aim to describe the dynamic relationship of text units to each other in the reading process. 

Within the framework of this study, the authors propose a scale of text element cohesion for analyzing written works of speech, consisting of three levels — explicit grammatical-syntactic, anaphoric, and implicit bonds. The effectiveness of applying this scale is demonstrated on the example of analyzing the text belonging to artistic styles — the most complicated in terms of semantics. 

In order to objectively determine the degree of cohesion of elements within the text, the authors propose a list of cohesion levels correlated with the universal scale of cohesion, which can be applied to texts belonging to any functional styles of speech.

Humanity has always strived to save energy of speech eff orts. According to the ancient Language Economy Principle, human speech has to be short and laconic, it has to insert the fragments of individual and collective experience into one or a few words to attain effective communication or adequate understanding. Syntactical compression and depth of sense, compact and striking phrases demand now the accelerated tempo. And for this certain linguistic rules, means and techniques are required. There appears a new integral graphic product — phrase epithet — the merging into one new word or word combinations. This new word acquires one new meaning that differs from the previous meanings of the epithet constructions.

The article considers the new educational and academic discipline “Regional studies”, with special attention to the discipline “Regional studies of Russia”. The main principles underlying the new discipline “Regional Studies of Russia” allow to fulfill several tasks, first of all, to respond to the urgent needs of the state and contribute to the realization of state policy, primarily in the sphere of state security, interethnic interaction, strengthening the unity of Russia. The main principle of the new direction is the study of Russia as a unified region with a common history, destiny and mechanisms of development. The conclusion summarizes the results of the work carried out since the opening of the new specialty in 2001. The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of MSU has carried out serious work on the development and promotion of the new scientific and educational direction of regional studies. The main theoretical and methodological approaches were worked out, the source base, which determines the fundamental nature of the science mentioned above, was elaborated in detail. The key factors of the region formation, its main parameters, constants and dominants were identified

Pictorial and graphic portraits of Mikhail Lomonosov created in the 18th century, during the life of the scientist and for several decades after his death, formed and consolidated his recognizable visual image. It is only natural that these portraits have piqued the interest of Russian scholars. Within a relatively short time of research in the field a long way was covered from a complete absence of any information about the portraits to constructing an impressive knowledge system and an accumulation of scientific interpretations. A domain of investigative issues has been established; a range of questions were asked. Almost every scientist who has addressed this topic tried to find the answers. However, no historiographical analysis of the identified issues has been carried out yet. Neither has the birth of theoretical concepts or the authors’ interpretations been outlined, nor how they changed over time, or how they were often radically revised.

This article presents the first systematized historiographical material, and for the first time highlights the main areas of research issues that were relevant for Russian scientists throughout the 20th–21st centuries. It considers not only the history of existence of the most important theoretical concepts, but the history of individual works, aspects of their interpretation, the existing sociocultural context.

Comparative culture studies is one of the promising and actively forming areas of the Russian humanities. The development of polar processes of globalization and localization of cultures, ethnocentrism and multiculturalism actualizes the task of studying the cultural diversity of the world. The discovery of common principles of harmonization of the human society and nature in the cultures of different countries and continents opens up new ways to prevent and solve acute political conflicts and environmental problems of our time. Created at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of Lomonosov Moscow State University, the research group brought together staff from various departments of the faculty engaged in holistic studies of cultural practices of the past and present. Special attention is paid to the actualization of the values and conceptual foundations of traditional cultures of the world. Along with theoretical problems, the research group in comparative culture studies is involved in the development and modeling of new forms of intercultural interaction and ways to improve the cultural competence of university and high school students. This is achieved, among other things, by organizing field culture studies in which the students of the faculty take an active part. The prospects and relevance of both theoretical and applied work of the research group “Comparative Culture Studies: Traditions and Modernity” are evidenced by a large number of conference papers and publications. The importance of scientific research in the field of comparative culture studies is due to the urgent need to update the intercultural, interregional, interethnic and interconfessional aspects of modern humanitarian knowledge.

This paper explores the potential of modern information resources such as supracorpora databases for the multidimensional study of punctuation. On the one hand, in different natural languages, while the repertoire of punctuation marks and their graphic representations tend to coincide, there may be zones of functional divergence, so that the rules of placement of the same punctuation mark will differ from one language to another. To know these interlingual discrepancies is fundamentally important for a human translator and for training machine translation systems; otherwise, the translation may significantly distort the semantic content of its source text. Some of these differences were recorded in the pre-corpus era. More of them can be revealed with the aid of supracorpora databases, modern information resources created through the joint efforts of computer science, computational linguistics, and corpus-based translation studies; they not only help to verify the existing knowledge on a wide scale of texts but also to amplify it. On the other hand, punctuation has traditionally been regarded as an area of language that is fairly well-studied, tightly regulated, and therefore least susceptible to change and innovation. However, supracorpora databases provide an opportunity to identify new (not yet found in the normative literature) functional-semantic features of the use of a given punctuation mark. Nowadays, the development of artificial intelligence based technologies, namely voice assistants, makes it particularly important to thoroughly research the functional semantics of punctuation marks. The paper shows the opportunities that supracorpora databases provide for punctuation studies, using the example of the exclamation mark in Russian and French .

This paper addresses the question of pronominal substitution of singular common gender nouns and indefinite pronouns in the English language. As for many contexts this problem remains unresolved, the cultural relevance of “singular they” as the epicene, or gender-neutral pronoun for third person singular use, in speech and writing is analyzed. This issue is briefly discussed in historical perspective, supported by the examples from famous literary works. The approach towards which epicene to use and what grammatical number it should be, is shown to have changed over time. Particular attention in the paper is paid to the present-day English. A survey of educated English speakers has proved that in order to eliminate gender prejudices modern society chooses “singular they”, using the language as a tool to demonstrate commitment to the idea of people’s equality. The attitudes of authoritative organizations to the choice of the pronoun referring to sex-indefinite singular antecedent are analyzed. They demonstrate current linguistic trends in the modern world. Even though the choice of the epicene for third-person singular use in contemporary English is commonly “singular they”, there remain restrictions imposed on the written pronoun paradigm.

Political media discourse accumulates and creates its own unique field of various vertical context elements, whose connotations, associations and meanings are determined by the communicative situation. The present study is undertaken to explore the functional potential of vertical context elements and examine the impact of its rendition on the quality of simultaneous interpretation. The main functions of vertical context elements in political media discourse prove to be ideological, self-presenting/image-forming and culture-identifying. Being aware of the functional potential of vertical context elements, used in speech not sporadically, but to achieve a specific communicative goal, is crucial to the choice of the appropriate interpreting strategy encompassing relevant techniques for its implementation. The findings further reveal that vertical context elements are characterized by multifunctionality. Moreover, the combination of these functions embodies the communicative intention of the speaker. From the perspective of simultaneous interpreting practice, it seems to be a prerequisite to aspire to determine and render the prevailing function. In political media discourse, the function instrumental in preserving the communicative effect of the source utterance seems to be the ideological one, manifesting itself in its two key varieties, namely manipulative and discrediting. The present research identifies the following extralinguistic factors that impede the proper rendition of the functional potential of vertical context elements: fast or situation-adjusted acceleration of the speaker’s speech rate, excessive redundancy of the source speech, inefficient allocation of attention resources and the mode of simultaneous interpreting..

The article examines the problem of interlanguage idiomaticity from the translation studies perspective. The concept of idiomatic translation is clarified; such type of translation is viewed as a process of inter-language transfer of the original semantic and pragmatic content, which follows the lexical, lexical-grammatical, pragmatic rules for the compatibility of linguistic elements in the target language and takes into account the selectivity of this language in expressing the complex meanings of language units. The article summarizes the possibilities of overcoming translation literalism and inter-language interference. It is shown that the concept of idiomatic translation embraces both the implied-meaning relationships between the source and the target messages (their equivalence, genre-stylistic, sociocultural and pragmatic correspondences) and the form of expression in the target message which is to adhere to the usage conventions of the target language. Using the example of the Russian translation of George Orwell’s essay “The Prevention of Literature,” the author analyzes translation solutions for the selection of inter-language correspondences for syntagmatically related units of different types (idioms, clichés, collocations) that require idiomatic ways of expressing complex lexical and lexical-grammatical meanings by means of the target language. Particular attention is paid to the problem of expressing context-dependent and evaluative connotations of idioms and collocations in the process of idiomatic translation.

The article presents the analysis of the research in the field of informatization of linguistic education. At the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FFLAS) Lomonosov Moscow State University within the framework of the declared direction two research projects are performed. On the one hand, theoretical foundations for the development of tutoring institute in the national e ducation system as a key condition for successful digitalization of the educational process are being developed; on the other hand, methods of implementation of the latest technologies, including those based on and using neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI), are being piloted. The article names the lecture, special and interfaculty courses offered by the FFLAS, as well as two master’s and two supplementary programs aimed at the formation of professional information and communication competence of all participants of the educational process.

Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into learning takes place at various levels of education. This process includes the design of multimodal didactic material, development of language skills, control and assessment, mining and analysis of educational data, prediction of learning outcomes. It is important not to skip any of these steps so that AI is implemented not only for providing access to information and the execution of routine test tasks, but also for contributing of real transformation in education. In teaching foreign languages today, various technical solutions based on AI are used, such as voice assistants; smart tutors; social and educational bots; automatic systems for assessment and editing of written texts; recommendation systems; intelligent foreign language teaching systems, etc. The objective of this article is to consider innovative approaches to language teaching based on using intelligent learning systems, as well as to analyze the design features of these systems. The concept of personalized learning, which is about adapting the organization, content and pace of learning to the individual needs of students, plays a key role in the design and development of intelligent learning systems. Intelligent learning systems and smart tutors can automatically adapt and create personalized educational material for various disciplines, taking into account the target audience, level of foreign language proficiency, professional and educational goals, intended learning outcomes through multimodal clustering and recommendation systems, automatic text processing and image recognition. The three main components underlying such systems include a domain model, a learner model, and a methodological model. Effective teaching approaches, such as providing feedback, assessment, reflection and recommendations for students, are important components of intelligent learning systems

The article discusses the necessity to refocus teaching pluricentric foreign languages from linguistic and cultural features in the traditional countries onto the specifics of varieties considered to be non-native for their users participating in a wide international / intercultural communication. East Asian varieties are a good example of such a phenomenon. For an unprepared communicator it is quite challenging to perceive and comprehend varieties of this type — challenges occur at all levels of language structure: phonographic, grammatical, lexico-semantic, and discourse-pragmatic. The ways to solve these problems include raising students’ awareness of the existence of the varieties of a pluricentric language, i.e., the World Englishes paradigm; receptive training of Asian English speech comprehension; awareness of challenges in understanding students’ own (Russian) variety of English (or another pluricentric language) for communicators using other varieties; studying translingual literature written by authors of Chinese (or other Asian) origin; listening and reading mass media in the variety; training intermediary translation from the variety into Russian, and acquiring the basis of intercultural literacy. All these ways are relevant not only for teaching Russian students; they will also help in teaching Chinese students whose number has been increasing at our universities