2018 Issue №1

The author analyses examples from the English language and, based on their analysis, investigates the mechanism of conceptual metonymy reflected in the syntactic structure of the utterance. Conceptual metonymy is considered as a factor determining the structure of the utterance describing a fragment of reality. The author explores models of metonymic transfers, in which spatial relations act as the source domain, and identifies types of situations, which are metonymically represented as the location and movement of the object in space.

The article discusses the communicative and pragmatic nature of intertextuality in political discourse, realized by different intertextual inclusions: allusions perform thematic functions in utterances specifying the thematic line in discourse while citations and phraseological units are used to form rhematic progressions, the aim of which is to provide new information about the theme. The theme-rheme sequence contributes to textual coherence; it facilitates a better understanding of the text and shapes the intented point of view in the reader.

The article deals with linguistic aspects of localizaton, in particular, with cultural adaptation of non-equivalent lexis in the translation of computer games from Russian into English. The research is focused on the types of nonequivalent lexical units typical of game discourse and their translation into the Russian language.

The author investigates the use of gender marked lexemes in retrospective texts of the 19th and 20th century written by male authors. Gender identity in the male written texts is reflected in gender marked lexemes (GML), representing subjective autonominations realized at the lexical level in subjectified and objectified ways. A specific feature typical of the actualization of GMLs relevant for male retrospective texts is their social context, i. e. professional and academic pragmatic parametres, personality traits, the spirit of male friendship etc. It indicates a high degree of socialization of men and the relevance of the collective male identity as a literary subject.

The author explores the function and role of modal particles in the texts of the St. Petersburg Vedomosti newspaper. Modal particles are describes as a means of representing the position of the author of newspaper texts, and speaking broadly, and a means of expressing subjective modality. Modal particles accentuate modal and textual meanings and bring socially significant information to the reader. The author analyses the role of modal particles in enriching news texts with modal and qualitative shades: drawing the reader's attention to relevant information, revealing communicatively meaningful content, expressing evaluation and separating facts from assumptions

The authors analyze modal semantics of infinitive sentences using examples from the Russian language of the second half of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Special attention is paid to the interaction of modal semantics with the pragmatic background of the utterance. The authors identify a variety of modal meanings, including those of necessity and obligation expressed by constructions with an independent infinitive in legislative directive documents. The authors analyze the dependence of the semantics of these constructions on the genre of the text.

The paper describes the results of denominal verb analysis. Corpora of media texts provide material for the analysis. The author explores patterns of novel meaning formation in denominal verbs. The proposed method is based on the notion of ‘seme-symbol’. The author reconstructions the semantic structure of motivating nouns and determines the role of different elements in the semantic structure of the verb. It is stressed that context contributes to the actualization or neutralization of particular semes, which leads to redistribution of elements in the semantic structure of the verb. The formation of novel meaning occurs through the actualization of the most relevant feature of the motivating noun in the semantic structure of the verb. The research on denominal verbal units showed that novel meaning formation is always contextually dependent. The redistribution of semes is caused by the influence of contextual qualifiers, resulting in the formation of new inner structural relations that lead to the formation of novel meanings of the verb.