2018 Issue №2

The author studies commercial documents (Smolensk, 17th century) from the perspective of anthropolinguistics and sociolinguistics to trace the development of the official anthroponymic formula in the western region of Russia. At that time, Smolensk was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The article places emphasis on the specifics of the naming process.

This article examines speech aspects of a strategic planning document — the Development Concept — and identifies factors determining its specifics. The text of the Concept is analysed using the communicative-genre approach, often employed in recent research works. This approach produces an integrated picture that takes into account parameters affected by both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The article describes speech representations of the key genre elements. These are the communicative goal, the image of the author and the addressee, the image of the past and the future, the content of the dictum, the language of a genre, and relevant means of speech representation. The authors conclude that the informative-explanatory function, which is central to the Development Concept, necessitates the use of certain genre elements and relevant language. There is a connection between informativeness and such genre elements as the communicative goal, the image of the author, the image of the addressee, and the content of the dictum. The explanatory function correlates with the composition and content structure, which is shaped by the genre elements of the image of the past and the image of the future. The article shows that the communicative-genre approach can be employed in examining the speech structure of texts fulfilling different functions. This will make it possible to describe the system of linguistic means used in such texts and to ensure efficient business communication.

Current processes in the stylistic system of the Russian language are related to qualitative (changing the language functional styles) and quantitative (the emergence of new styles) transformations. The author explores the correlation of styles and different types of discourse as communicative speech formations. Special attention is given to the cognitive and awareness factors as criteria for the identification of styles and types of discourse.

The author explores the importance of the autobiographical component in literary works. The article offers a linguostylistic analysis of short stories by the German writer H. Hesse. In these stories, the writer reconstructs his past based on his memories. The article analyses methods of linguistic actualisation and reproduction of past experiences as an integral element of autobiographical memory and describes the verbalisation of obliviscence. The author holds that H. Hesse deliberately uses a number of stylistic, lexical and grammatical means as implied explicators.

Contemporary communication is witnessing an increasing role of visual elements. The development of cinema as a special sign system has contributed to this trend. Scholars agree on the definition of the film text as a unique type of text comprising both verbal and non-verbal elements. Film adaptations are an instance of intersemiotic translation. Today, television series are growing in popularity. This article studies various classifications of film text elements and analyses non-verbal signs used to demonstrate power in the ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Hollow Crown’ TV series, which are construed as an intersemiotic translation of G. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series of novels and W. Shakespeare’s plays respectively. The author identifies signs serving as non-verbal lexical units of the film text, used to emphasize the authority of a character.

The study of territory branding as a part of communicative process requires the detailed analysis of advertising and PR-texts placed on accessible Web-portals. The current study presents a linguistic analysis of means of the territory management optimizing and of defining the role of linguistic means in the branding discourse. The material of the study is the number of texts (original and translated) in Russian, English and German placed on accessible Web-portals of different regions or on accessible official Web-portals of different touristic regions and cities. It was showed that the linguistic focus of territory branding should take into account communicative focus of text, its genre characteristics; communicative function, its pragmatic task; linguistic means of branding.