Moscow University Bulletin. Series 19. Linguistics and Intercultural Communication. 2024. 4.

The purpose of the paper is to point out some theoretical problems concerning the so-called textual inclusions, with their deep intertextuality and ability to generate new texts. Such approach gives a new impetus to outlining the ways of their possible role in the derivational mythological history, semiotic cultural memory and traditions. The cognitive aspects of these texts are analyzed, the chain links are constructed. Much attention is paid to the classification of the different types of the intertextual inclusions, specifically emphasizing their role in changing and reframing the reader’s cognitive system. The paper allows the author to take into account the interdisciplinary aspect of the cognitive linguistics linked with other interdisciplinary sciences.

The article examines the role of key words in the artistic organization of a literary work on the basis of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. It has been discovered that the most frequently used lexical units in the text are adjectives with negative evaluative connotations: monstrous, horrible, dreadful, hideous and such like. Among them monstrous stands out as the main key word in spite of the fact that its frequency of occurrence is lower than that of its ‘synonyms’: 25 vs 48, 43, 32 times respectively. In fact, monstrous meets other criteria that seem to be essential in the case of key words. It appears in all significant episodes of the novel; it is characterized by lexical polyphony, great collocational potential, a variety of contextual links and due to the component “morally wrong” in its semantics is connected with the author’s global purport. It is also shown that the ‘intuitive’ linguopoetic analysis of key words can be supported by modern computer programs, like Sketch Engine, which work with text corpora .

The paper discusses culture-specific communicative features of official Russian, British, American, and Cypriot universities websites. The research focuses on context models of collective authors. The contribution deals with specific type of discourse which (following contemporary tendencies in discourse analysis) is referred to as “active effect discourse”. The study relies on interdisciplinary data provided by various spheres relevant to the issue under consideration. Thus, the study provides an overview of trends and tendencies in the development of modern education, outlines techniques used for online promotion of educational programs, describes specific features of communication environment. The paper analyses the structure and the content of official university websites, outlines verbal means used by collective authors of the texts under consideration in order to appeal to the target audience, and conducts analysis of culture-specific meanings conveyed through these means. The article also outlines prospects for future research on communication style adopted by the collective author of promotional texts functioning in digital learning environment.

This paper gives an insight into the major outcomes of the 2019–2023 MSU research project on investigating mediation as a language-and-culture bound communicative mode and as a new objective of modern tertiary language education in Russia. Mediation skills are thought to be of primary importance for the Russian academic elite’s intercultural communication in the world facing the war of values in which the academic elite is expected to act as a promoter of the dialogue of cultures and civilizations, able to preserve cultural heritage and counteract modern cultural vandalism, cultural imperialism and the policy of cancel culture whenever the latter happen to be in society. The paper starts with some introductory notes on the importance of the 21-st century terminology changes in language pedagogy because of a paradigmatic shift from traditional language skills as objectives of language education to 4 modes of communication (reception, production, interaction and mediation). It discusses the outcomes of the 2016–2021 international research projects on updating CEFR descriptors and on sharing pedagogical experiences in teaching and evaluating mediation skills. The author finds it necessary to rethink these research outcomes with a focus on the needs, objectives and training content of mediation education for different types of learners or trainees (MD / PhD students, PhD researchers of different ranks) and offers a linguodidactic vision of establishing a framework for a) teaching master’s degree students and PhD students to mediate a text & b) teaching university researchers/teachers to mediate concepts and to mediate communication. This conceptual framework is based on the 2018–2022 research results of several studies carried out to identify MD and PhD students’ needs to act as mediators in international academic settings, the needs, readiness and abilities of Humanities scholars to act as pluricultural mediators while participating in international scientific & educational communication.

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

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 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.

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.

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..

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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