Based on the modern Russian and Polish texts of different genres and styles, the authors consider the functioning of the Russian verb мочь and the Polish móc as main explicators of the modal meaning of possibility within their respective microfields. The article identifies the universal characteristics and intralinguistic features of the verbs’ functioning.
Based on Mstislav the Great’s Aprakos, the authors consider the functioning of linguistic units expressing the meaning of situational modality (possibility, desirability, necessity). The article establishes a semantic correlation between the use of these explicators and the fundamental moral and ethical postulates of Christianity.
This article discusses the features of the author’s modal evaluations in the texts of the first Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The article identifies modal evaluative meanings and the language means of their implementation and analyses the mechanism of interaction between objectively modal and subjectively modal meanings aimed at fulfilling the author’s intentions in the framework of newspaper information.
This article discusses the problems of a linguistic study into personal names based on hagiographic hymnography. The author describes the methodology of cultural linguistic representation of the name of Saint Basil of Moscow based on anthroponyms and vocatives nominating the saint in the August Menaion from the collection of the Wojnowo Monastery (Poland).
Based on a comparison of translations of B. Pasternak’s poem “February”, the author raises the question as to the possibility of preserving the grammar strategies of the original in translation and the degree of stability of “poetry grammar” as a meaning generating mechanism.
This article focuses on the interpretation of occasionalisms motivated by proper names through references to background knowledge, and cultural and historical context as presented in the poetical works of 20th century poets (V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, etc.). The author addresses the problem of the lexicographical description of these lexical units.
This article deals with the heterogeneity of author's illocutionary intentions in the process of creating a dramatic paratext. It is suggested that the pragmatic orientation of typologically different paratextual structures can be purely directive (prescriptive) as well as narrative, which emphasizes the transgenre character of paratext. The article addresses the specific features of implementation of the extradiegetic author category in drama on a paratextual level, as well as its role in the creation of dramatic diegesis.
This article considers the adverb odnazhdy as an element of “narrative syntax” of D. Kharms’s prose. The author analyses its role in the creation of narrative space in the texts of experimental type.
This paper analyzes a specific group of phraseological reflexes based on an assonance rhyme with an initial interrogative utterance. Assonance phraseological reflexes cannot perform a descriptive or nominative function acting in the process of verbal interaction only as markers of pragmatic intentions. Therefore, the attempts to describe them in terms of traditional semantics prove unsuccessful. A proper study of assonance phraseological reflexes is possible only in the framework of speech act theory. From the cognitive perspective, these units of speech are an example of a language game typical of speech subcultures.
The tactics of a language game aimed at activating background knowledge of the recipient are studied in the texts of jokes, crossword puzzles, and other literature and speech materials. Special attention is paid to language games focusing on the reader’s knowledge of history in the Old Slavic epic poem The Tale of Igor's Campaign.
The orientation function of newspaper headlines is considered as one of its major pragmatic properties. Special attention is paid to analysing verbal and non-verbal means of headline implementation of headlines that significantly increase its pragmatic potential. The study is based on headlines of the Russian federal and regional press of 2010-2013.
This article considers the discourse of university websites as a type of computer mediated communication. It is shown that university website discourse is of heterogeneous nature. The author analyses the interaction of educational, scientific, and advertising discourses. Special attention is paid to the employed communication strategies and the linguistic means of their implementation. The study is based on the official websites of the leading Russian universities.
This article presents the results of a communicative study of the charter documents of “Proryv” volunteer centre. The author describes the main communicative strategies and tactics used in the regulations on the centre establishment and job descriptions to express the communicative purpose of regulating department and employee activities. The author identifies the linguistic means of implementing said strategies and tactics in the texts of these documents.
This article deals with the functional and semantic features of performative verbs in the texts of documents. Performatives are defined as significant structure and content components of text solving the pragmatic task of establishing the contact between the addresser and addressee. The author identifies the communicative and pragmatic features of this genre of documents in view of its subgenre types.
G. H. Miller’s dream dictionary is analysed from the perspective of modern cognitive linguistics. The author examines its cultural characteristics, embeddedness in the context of dreams, the polysemy of the key image, and the possibility of homonymy. Gender dependence and subject-object differentiation are identified as important features of dream interpretations in the dictionary. The author describes three mechanisms of semantic transformation behind the dream interpretation: metaphoric conversion, metonymic shift, and pragmatic extension.
This article identifies the cognitive tactics behind the interpretation of dreams in the ancient Assyrian text known as the Dream Book. Its basic characteristics include belief in the prophetic power of dreams, ritual orientation to men, regard for image polysemy and the use of symbols, employment of such mechanisms as metaphor, metonymy, pragmatic shifts, patronymic attraction, replacements based on the antonym principle. These mechanisms are identified as underlying the formation of symbolic content structures.
This article solves the problem of identifying cognitive tactics developed in literary dreams. These include content dependence on the context, possible reproduction of future events, special significance on reproduced events, symbolic representation, the need for interpreter, etc. The obtained comparative data make it possible to speak of general mechanisms of dreams.
N. Kononov’s short story “Anastasia’s amnesia” is used to study the mythopoetic code forming the basis of the writer’s works. The article considers the semantics of human life as vegetation in its connection to the “life-death”, “young-old”, and “top-bottom” oppositions. The author’s approach consists in reconstructing the writer’s method of meaning and text generation based on the game potential of language up to using a multilingual anagrammatic code and reconsideration of language category.
This article explores the inversion of central meaning oppositions in the short story: north-south, palm-fir. The author emphasises role of intertextual interaction as a means of opposition formation. The comparison of A. Grin’s “Fandango”, M.Yu. Lermontov’s “In the wild north…”, and H. Heine’s “Ein Fichtenbaum” is used to prove that A. Grin’s implicit language game is based on a multilingual anagrammatic code. The article examines the implicit semantics of the short story based on the writer’s game projections into his own works.
This article attempts to identify the dominant oriental hetero-images of the eighteenth-century English essays. It deals with the imagological structures of the oriental essay, by means of which the author outlines the main oriental constructs on the Englishmen’s «mental map» as artistic methods of opening up the literary space of the era.
This article analyzes the opposition of open and enclosed space in the novels of Jena and Heidelberg romantics, considering its relation to the problems of artist’s personality and freedoms. An analysis of similar space images used by several authors shows how the tradition was reinterpreted at different stages of romantic thought. Stepping out into the open, which expresses liberation from limitations imposed on the individual, is one of the key motives in the novels of Jena period, while the Heidelberg novel stresses the positive value of “limits”.
This article compares the poetics of two works by Hesse and Frisch brought together by a similar topic and complex of motives up to identical plot elements. It is shown that the problem of self-identification is solved differently by two writers: Hesse’s solution lies in Klein’s rejection of the role and mask of Wagner, which was imposed on him by the society, through a voluntary death, whereas Frisch’s character Stiller faces desolation and shows outward acceptance of his name and role still rejecting them inside.
The parabolic works of F. Kafka and F. Dostoevsky are compared in the ideational context of the 20th century philosophy in relation to different philosophical interpretations of sin and crime. The ideal world of these works is considered in the light of sociocultural experience of totalitarian system, its later analysis and overcoming. The author address the writers’ interest in the psychological determination of enslavement and the unconscious mechanism of rejecting freedom.
The author focuses on the response to the short stories of the Latvian writer Rudolf Blaumanis within the intertextual space of literature. Blaumanis’s short stories are considered as pre-texts for the works of H. Sudermann, Ch. Aitmatov, and V. Astafyev. The author analyses the logic and forms of interaction between texts in the literary era in question.
Peter Handke’s novel is considered in the context of a change of eras in European and German art. The results of the study is the identification of the aesthetic characteristics of the writer’s prose that exhibits the features of both modernist and postmodernist poetics reflecting the general historical and literary pattern that has become the focus of current discussions.
This article analyses the books of the Polish writer Maria Danilewicz-Zielińska The fado of my life and Essays on literary emigration. The author focuses on Danilewicz-Zielińska’s recollections and criticism of the members of the Skamander group: Julian Tuwim, Jan Lechoń, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Stanisław Baliński, etc. The article explores the logic of the writer’s assessments of her contemporaries and emphasises the historical significance of Danilewicz-Zielińska’s memoirs.
The body is considered as a spatial structure that serves in M. Tsvetaeva’s poetics as a form of spatial “exploration” of the world. The authors describe the functioning of the body image as a model juxtaposed with the structure of universe, on the one hand, and the being of the poet, on the other. The article explores the connection between this model and the image of Sybilmountain-cave-tree as a hollow body “inhabited” by God and the problem of overcoming the corporeal and achieving the true, out-of-body being.