2021 Vol. 12 №1

The article explores literary communication as one of the types of linguistic communica­tion. The main objective is to develop a linguo-aesthetic model of literary communication based on the models of the sign, semiosis and communication adopted in linguistics, semiotics and poetics. The author employs semiotic methods of modelling the sign and communication, developed in the works of Frege, Peirce, Shpet, Mukařovsky, Jakobson, Lotman, Eco, Novikov, and Zolyan. The emphasis is laid on the models of the sign and the corresponding models of semiosis in relation to literary systems. The concept of literary communication is given a new definition; it refers to the interaction of the author as an artist and the reader (viewer, listen­er) through a message or an utterance as a work of art. A correlation is established between the structure of the literary sign and the structure of the act of literary communication. The linguo-aesthetic model of artistic communication reflects the correspondence between types of literary signs and elements of communication.

Translation of philosophical texts is a special challenge because of specific philosophical idiom and conceptual complexity of the narrative. It is not surprising that such translations are often accompanied by commentaries where the translator steps out of the shadows to justi­fy the translational decisions. This kind of supplementary text called the “translational peritext” is under study in this paper aiming to reveal the cognitive effort the translation process involves, and to explore the author-translator-reader relationship. The purpose of the article is to analyze paratextual elements in the translation of an essay on philosophical aes­thetics in search of answers to three main questions: What does the translator choose to com­ment on, and why? What is specific about the role and function of translational peritext in philosophical artistic discourse? How do the commented translational decisions affect, if at all, the reader’s understanding of the author’s stance? The problem of revealing the translator’s agency, his/her motivations and decision-making is investigated on the basis of the essay Analysis of Beauty by the celebrated 18th century English artist William Hogarth — an in­fluential philosophical treatise whose ideas have never lost their relevance. The paper starts with the brief account of the concept of paratext, its types and functions; it will then proceed to specificities of philosophical translation. In the main part of the article, the background information on the material under study precedes the analysis of the identified commented translational issues.

The article examines the specifics of the translation of postmodern philosophical termi­nology. The authors explore Russian translations of the works of the modern French postmod­ernist philosophers Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. Postmodernism as a philosophical movement is based on the concept of radical plurality. It is characterised by the multiplicity of dimensions and types of analysis. The authors look into the problem of choosing strategies for the translation of postmodern terminology and analyse the dilemma translators have to face: how to manoeuvre between polysemy and ambiguity in the transla­tion of philo­sophical terms. The article analyses the translation of Foucault’s seminal work Les Mots et les Choses (translated by Avtonomova and Vizgin). Special attention is paid to the problem of translation of the postmodern terms discourse and episteme. Another focus of research is the analysis of the translation of Baudrillard’s work Simulacres et Simulation (translated by Pechenkina). In the final part of the article, the authors analyse the peculiarities of the transla­tion of Derrida's treatise into Russian.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the translation of basic epistemological terms and attempts to analyse cognitive factors underlying the construction of meaning in the translation process. Apart from linguistic expertise, the translation of philosophical texts re­quires a profound understading of the subject matter. Ambiguity of philosophical terms, which appears as a result of the development of a particular concept within a specific philo­sophical school of thought, may lead to inconsistencies in the translation decision-making. The paper aims to apply a cognitive approach to the translation of epistemological terms into the German and English language: Erkenntnis/cognition vs knowledge. In this study, context is interpreted as a verbalization of a specific conceptual frame facilitating the identification of the appropriate meaning of the term on a deeper, conceptual level. The article contains nu­merous examples from the works of Immanuel Kant translated into English as well as the data from multilingual translation corpora which are used to describe translation-relevant aspects of conceptual integration in philosophical discourse.

The Ust-Tsilemsky region of the Komi Republic is known for its collection of medieval handwritten books and manuscripts. These collections found in the area of the Lower Pechora River contain a rich variety of Old Believers’ written documents of different genres. The au­thors explore one of these documents — St. Augustine’s Miracle of the Revelation of the El­der, which exists in two different Pechora documents. One of them is a hagiographic text cre­ated by the famous Ust-Tsilma scribe and editor of Old Russian texts Myandin, who lived in the second half of the 19th century. The Miracle is a part of the Book of St. Augustine and has survived in only a few copies. It is noteworthy that Myandin’s works have not been previous­ly studied. Employing textual analysis, the authors came to the conclusion which of the two Myadlin’s texts is closer to the earliest surviving scroll of the Miracle (Science Library of Moscow State University, the collection of manuscripts of the Old Believers of Bessarabia and Belaya Krinitsa, No. 2194, fol. 109—115 ob). This is a text contained in the Tsvetnik, com­piled by Myandin. The study showed that the other copy is a later work of the scribe on the storyline of The Miracle, which involved the shortening of the text, the introduction of new narrative details, naming the main character, and providing a more detailed description of his appearance. The authors argue that, at a later stage of mastering the plot of the Miracle, My­andin created his own version of the events described. He employed his own vocabulary satu­rating the plot with details, which were missing in the first version. He cleared the text of unnecessary motives that distract the reader from the main idea of the story: holiness does not depend on rank or status; it can also be granted to a humble, illiterate person who is capable of performing miracles.

This article is devoted to one of the important aspects of studying the Russian business language of the second half of the 19th century — the formation of the lexical meaning of the noun visilka (exile, expulsion), typical of the police procedure documentation of the time. The author discovered business texts of this type in the funds of the State Archive of the Tyumen region, the State Archive of the Omsk region, and the State Archive of the Irkutsk region. All texts date back to the late 19th century. The study of the lexeme visilka was conducted in ac­cordance with the lexicographic portraiture methodology (proposed by Apresyan and Mayorov) and the principles of linguistic study of source texts. A comprehensive analysis of the lexical distribution of the noun visilka determined the necessity of abstract or concrete-abstract vector locatives, which expanded the lexical meaning of this lexeme in the business texts of the second half of the 19th century. The authors identified the main semantic features of the noun visilka (the dominance of the archiseme — 'process', the existence of the differen­tial semes 'result', 'actions of people involved in a police search'). Further research is aimed at examining business writings from Western and Eastern Siberia, which belong to a different genre and a different time period. Further research will be based on the texts from the Nation­al Corpus of the Russian language, the Uppsala and Tyubinsk corpuses, the database of the Russian press Integrum and Open Corpus.

The article explores the specifics of the paremic space of the coronavirus discourse, in which new images of typical situations related to the coronavirus pandemic are formed. The coronavirus narrative affects the use of phraseological units and paroemias, which, despite their stable structure, are subject to various modifications. The aim of this research is to de­termine the ways paroemias are modified by time-reframing, being one of the main discourse strategies. Modifications of phraseological units are set by the pragmatic goal of the subject of discourse, who, on the one hand, introduces new relevant information into the language, and on the other, is forced to protect himself / herself from any negative information. This implies an axiological reinterpretation of statements and their humorous presentation. The research methodology includes linguistic, pragmatic and cultural analyses used to study language phenomena as a means of organizing social experience in speech communication, as well as corpus-based methods of the selection and processing of linguistic data. This involves not only identifying language units and structures, but also describing conditions and mechanisms for their selection and functioning. The research material included examples of phraseological and paremiological transformations characteristic of the coronavirus discourse: refraseologization, formation of new meanings of idioms, and lexical and structural changes of phraseological units. Special attention is paid to the so-called ‘naïve’ axiology. The coronavirus discourse includes neologisms, a significant number of phraseological units and idioms, which have acquired new meanings, as well as new proper nouns such as Raskhlamingo, Kovidlo and Ukhan’ka.