Moscow University Bulletin. Series 19. Linguistics and Intercultural Communication. 2021. 4.

This article deals with the study of behaviours peculiar to different peoples during the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic delivered a heavy blow to globalisation, both as a concept and a process. Its expansion and acceleration have been obvious in the recent years, including in the fields of culture and everyday life. One of the major questions raised by globalisation deals with its impact on the national (regional) cultures: does it destroy the local traditions, customs and lifestyles, or does it enrich them with new opportunities? The pandemic has clearly demonstrated resilience of national traditions, mentalities and distinctive behaviour patterns. In the time of a serious crisis it has become evident that national distinctness is preserved behind the external uniformity of the material culture. It has manifested itself in different areas, including in how different nations reacted to the pandemic- related quarantine and restrictions, and what steps their governments took. This study is predominantly based on media reports, web resources, statistical information, and data issued by a number of research and non-governmental organisations. As an additional source, it uses findings from a survey conducted by the author among the students of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in January-February 2021.

In the article the author examines the geoliterary aspects of “The Letters of a Russian Traveler” by N.M. Karamzin. This means that travel writing is seen as a way of literary exploration of space. Karamzin’s literary journey is characterized as a secular pilgrimage, in which holy places are replaced by cultural ones – natural, historical, cultural, and literary. The author changed the established vector of cultural assessments, considering Europe not as “paradise” and not as “hell”, but as a cultural space equal to Russia. “Notes” convincingly demonstrates that literary travel has a cyclical structure and a clear-cut spatial organization, which includes the linear space of roadside landscapes and the nuclear space of stops, which should be considered as an entrance to another culture. Important attributes of literary travel include a low speed of movement, which allows you to “read” the aesthetics and structure of the cultural roadside landscape, but also a low pace of the journey itself, which optimally combines stops and crossings, which allows you to harmonize the perception and images of new countries and localities.

Of a special interest to contemporary researchers are the topics related to the history of the second world war, especially concerning the “artistic intellectuals and the war”. No doubt that from the point of view of regional studies, this issue is relevant because it contributes to the further development of theoretical and methodological approaches to it, and the replenishment of factual knowledge about the features of tackling it in different regions. In this article, the issue is dealt with on the example of artistic contribution of the Polish intelligentsia in the struggle against fascism during the second world war. Poland was fully occupied and subject to regulations established by the occupying forces. It was in that country that the rules of the“New Order” were tried and tested, later to be introduced in other countries, including the occupied territories of the USSR. In October 12, 1939 in the Gazette of the Third Reich was published a decree on the General government in the Eastern parts of the Polish lands, while the Western ones were annexed to the Reich. The official programme in the field of culture for the Poles was also officially announced. It was actually aimed at the destruction of the Polish national culture. Many of the artists of Poland during the second world war were connected with the Resistance movement. They contributed to the struggle, creating works of fine and performing arts, music and cinema. In difficult illegal conditions there was even restored the process of teaching all types of art to young people by way of caring about the post-war development of national art creativity.

The last decades of the 19th century were marked by an unprecedented growth of the so-called “non-academic ethnography” in Russia. This period of time witnessed a rise in the number of ethnographic descriptions of the peoples of Russia created by non-academic researchers, such as teachers, doctors, government officials, clergymen, political exiles, rather than professional scholars. The texts created by them, both nonfiction and literary, are extremely valuable for the study of the spiritual heritage of the peoples of Russia. The article provides a definition for the term “non- academic ethnography” and substantiates the legitimacy of its use; it outlines the methodological aspects and the prospects of using non-academic ethnography for the study of traditional cultures of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. The two identified extensive groups of sources are missionary diaries and ethnographic works written by political exiles. The article proves the need for a discursive approach to their study and the importance of considering extra-textual phenomena, such as: the collective identity of the authors of these works, their behavioral practice, the ideological semantic field which defines the position and the goals of the non-profession- al ethnographers, etc. Although the research potential of the indicated sources is evident, its actualization requires the implementation of modern scientific methods.

Paolino’s funeral is a ceremony held during the Greek Carnival in Martignano (Apulia region).This is an example of a restored tradition of the ethnolinguistic minorities of Southern Italy, but with the rather archaic and specific features of traditional culture being taken into account. On the one hand, the rite goes back to the tradition of burning or tearing of a Shrovetide effigy, typical of European city carnivals and symbolizing the passing period. On the other hand, depending on new conditions and political nomenclature, the tradition is supplemented with new meanings and newly invented elements. This study attempts to identify the degree of presence of Greek elements in the rite “La Morte te lu Paolinu”, describe the mechanisms that organizers use in the process of reconstructing an older rite, and determine the main functions of this reconstruction.

The article is devoted to the Soviet influence on work of Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine according to the memoirs of its member Bartley Crum, who in 1947 published a book “Behind the Silken Curtain”. Anglo-American Committee’s work took part in Europe and the Near East in 1945–1946 and, as a result, the committee came to the conclusion that the solution of the refugees’ problem is to permit Jewish refugees to go to Palestine. The Soviet Union was excluded from the work, and even though some officials from the State Department and lots of British officials were afraid of the Soviet expansion and the increase of Soviet influence in the Middle East, the real impact was rather small. However, the deep distrust between former alliances made the solution of the Palestine problem uncompleted, the report of the Committee evoked the protest in the Arab world and the negative reaction of the Soviet government. Arab-Israeli conflict has not been settled yet. Although the relations between European Jews, Muslims and European nations have changed drastically, the new challenges in foreign relations connected with refugees’ problem and the Middle East conflicts demand the contribution of all main actors.

In this article the question of representation of the global scholastically common concept COVID-19 is described. The author gives reasons for considering the medical term COVID-19 as the conceptual sphere. The predominant role of the buzzwords is highlighted, as they reflect the changes in socio-economic and political areas. The author resorts to the methods of cognitive linguistics, ligvo-pragmatics and semantics analyzing the research material, which help to establish connections between cognition and perception, understanding of the existing socio-economic and political realities to trace the implementation of new meanings in the language. Applying the above mentioned methods to the material under analysis enabled the author to single out dominant color characteristics of the studied concepts, its verbal and non-verbal (“quarantine etiquette”, creolized text etc.) means of describing the conceptual sphere, the key buzzwords and lexico-semantic fields they comprise, and lingvo-stylistic means and devices, such as parody, pun etc.

A linguistic representation of ethnic ideas of the French about the peoples of the Russian territories which were formed in the initial period of Russian-French cultural contacts are considered in the article. The material of the study is written French-language documentary records about the representatives of Russia of the XVI–XVII centuries. The research is carried out taking into account the main approaches to understanding the phenomenon of ethnicity, developed by Russian and foreign scholars of the XX–XXI centuries. The presence of shared ideas of the members of the ethnic community about the common origin, language, material and spiritual culture, the recognition of the important role of ethnic identity for the self- expression of the community and its recognition by others are taken into consideration. As a result of the analysis of the material, the following ethnic characteristics of the peoples of Russia were noted: language, territories of settlement, behavior patterns, religion, clothing, appearance. The main features of the formation of ethnic ideas of the French about the ethnic communities inhabiting Russia were also identified, such as: background knowledge of large ethnic groups whose names were reflected on the European maps; differentiation of known ethnic communities into sub-ethnic groups; special attention to peoples who successfully master military techniques; uncertainty in determining the ethnicity of a group; substitution of ethnic identity for regional; interest in areas of interaction between ethnic groups. The specificities of the formation of ethnic representations are reflected in the language in the following processes: adaptation of the French orthography of the ethnonym to the acoustic form of the Russian word; expansion of the list of ethnonymic lexemes, taking into account the differentiation into sub-ethnic groups; creation of ethnonyms-occasionalisms; use of ethnically unmarked substitutes instead of ethnonyms.

For texts produced in any natural human language and translated into other natural languages, translation theory has developed a reliable conceptual apparatus and terminology that allow their unbiased comparative analysis leading to valid conclusions as to the merits and demerits of the translations. Although the concept of intersemiotic translation was introduced into translation studies as early as 1959, it has been much less studied than interlingual translation: it is not even very clear to what extent the traditional concepts and metalanguage of translation theory apply to this type of translation. Having analyzed the illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass made by different artists, as well as television commercials and film adaptations of literary works, we show that interactions of semiotically heterogeneous strata within multimodal texts could be viewed as varieties of intersemiotic translation and their study could be based on the traditional categorical and conceptual apparatus of translation theory (the notions of equivalence, adequacy, domestication / foreignization, cultural adaptation, literal / freestyle translation, translation transformations, etc.). It has been revealed, however, that in certain types of multimodal (polycodal) texts the interaction of semiotic codes of different nature has obvious specificities that do not fit into the familiar theoretical paradigm and require an expansion of the framework of translation theory, thus contributing to its further development.

The syllabus of the discipline “Language situation and language policy in European countries” is an interdisciplinary review of key issues related to the problems of language policy in European countries and the current language situation in Europe. Classical methodological approaches to the study of these categories (sociolinguistic, legislative, institutional, medial, language teaching, etc.) as well as new ones (discursive, politically correct, pluricentric, economic, etc.) are analyzed. In addition, the course focuses on the specificity of language policy in some European countries, considering the variety of pluricentric European languages (e.g. the German language and German-speaking countries). The content of the program includes materials on the following topics: relationship between language and the state, language and society, language and power, definitions and typologies of language situations and language policies, language planning, language regime, minority languages, language rights, language contacts and conflicts. The course analyzes in detail the practices of language policies in European countries in various socio-discursive areas: legal regulation, language education, science, economics, media, applied terminology and others. The influence of the theory of political correctness on the development of language policies of European states is also discussed. The program is based on the author’s experience of lecturing at the Department of Linguistics and Intercultural Communication and the Translation Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University.

The article considers parenthetical insertions and inversion as signals of emotivity of a literary text. Parenthetical insertions, inversion, and interjections refer to such significant words or phrases that do not carry a syntactic load, but they express the attitude of the speakers to the utterance, give them a certain assessment, and characterize the ways of their design. According to the author, they fit perfectly into the scheme that organizes the emotional space of a literary text. The main goal of the work is to identify the role of such language tools as inversion and parenthetical insertions as some “signaling” of the emotivity of a literary text. As a result of the research, fragments from the novel by Ch. Abdullayev “The Court of the Wrongs” were identified in which these linguistic means in total charge the text with expression. At the same time, it is taken into account that, on the one hand, they differentiate feelings and emotions that are part of the semantics of the emotive field. On the other hand, they are unified according to certain criteria. The results of the research can be used in courses of lectures on linguistics, analysis of literary text at seminars and workshops. This article will be of interest to linguists dealing with the problems of parenthetical insertions and inversion. В результате исследования были выделены фрагменты из романа Ч. Абдуллаева «Суд неправых», в которых данные языковые средства в совокупности заряжают текст экспрессией.