2023 Vol. 14 №1

The article explores the images of the German cities, Lubeck and Hamburg, presented in Nikolay Gretsch’s travelogue “The real trip to Germany in 1835”. The author determines the link between the images of the two cities and the tradition of describing Germany as an idyllic place. This tradition was widespread in Russian literature at the end of the 18th century — first half of the 19th century. In Gretsch’s text, Lubeck and Hamburg are depicted as idyllic but to different degrees. The locus of Lubeck is a homogeneous, patriarchal and achronous idyll, a static space that seems to have frozen in the Middle Ages. In contrast to Lübeck, the city of Hamburg is depicted as a large, contemporary, and dynamic city — in other words, as a modern type of idyll. Moreover, its orderliness goes beyond the idyll and is defined by the rational organisation of space, which is characterised by heterogeneity. Firstly, the idyllic subloci are distinguished, where the key role belongs to the demi-natural images of the garden, the park and the promenade. Secondly, the utilitarian-rational subloci of the stock exchange, quay, and canals are described. Subloci, which are marked by both idyll and rationality, have been identified (e. g. an orphanage, an almshouse). Finally, the third spatial type identified marginal sublocations of seafarers’ establishments associated with the motives of disorderli­ness — drunkenness, debauchery, etc.

The article is devoted to reflecting the image of a city in verbal data — topographic names. The author bases the research upon the ideas of the cultural-semiotic approach to city studies, upon the conception of a city as a text and palimpsest and sets the goal of investigat­ing semantic changes in the toponymic text of Ekaterinburg examined in its historical dynam­ics. The main stages of modification of the Ural city toponymic image are characterized via the metaconcept of chronotopos. As a tool of linguocultural analysis per se, generalised onomasio­logical, semantic models, or cultural semantic codes, are used. These involve landscape-distinctive, social-functional and social-symbolic codes. The paper defines the specificity of the realisation of cultural semantic codes in the toponymy (urbanonymy) of Ekaterinburg relative to three chronotopic junctures determined by the city renaming landmark acts — Ekaterin­burg, Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg. Topical meanings are revealed in the toponymic portrait of the city in different periods of its life. The changes that increase in the toponymy in the framework of one chronotopic juncture and contribute to the transference of a part of cultural experience to the next historic period are traced. In the image of Ekaterinburg represented in its toponymic text, traits of the city’s territorial identity underpinned by its natural and geo­graphical, economic and social factors are indicated.

The article aims to reveal the principles of urban space organisation in Viktor Marti­novich’s novel “Mova”. Due to the fact that the novel is based on a linguistic problem (the author defines the genre of the novel as a “linguistic thriller”), the representation of the city in the novel is subject to linguistic models and principles. The main of these principles is the isomorphism of the part and the whole. The structural generality of the different levels of the novel and the novel space is based on the technique of inversion. There is a movement of value poles within the system of oppositions, at the level of narrative, plot and space (the aggressor — the victim, the East — the West, the centre — the periphery, one’s own — someone else’s). The generally accepted structure of the zones of the centre and the periphery is changing: the periphery is associated with order and norm, and the centre — with the concepts of chaos, disor­ganization, and deviation. The opposition of one’s own and someone else’s (language, space) comes to the fore, which corresponds to the socio-cultural context of Belarusian litera­ture. The centre and the periphery are structured according to different cultural models: the centre is or­ganized according to the dual model, and the periphery according to the ternary one.

The article is devoted to extralinguistic factors that contribute to the renaming of cities in one of the North Caucasian regions of Russia. The study of toponymy, in particular, the oikonyms of a certain territory, is of great importance for the study of the history, ethnogra­phy, and culture of the people living in this territory. The purpose of this work is to identify the original names of settlements and study new names of cities, which will contribute to a more fruitful study of socio-historical processes and lexical-semantic transformations in the language of the inhabitants of these settlements. This is especially true for studying the histo­ry of such new-written languages ​​as the Adyghe (Circassian) languages, in the absence of written monuments (Adygs — endonym, Circassians — exonym). The results of the study have led to the conclusion that cities in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic are the least protected from renaming for ideological and political reasons, rather than rural settlements.

The paper analyzes the concept of social meaning, which has been conceptualized in lexi­cal semantics since the 1980s and has become central in modern sociolinguistics and linguis­tic anthropology. It has been used to describe pragmatic increments in the meaning of a lan­guage unit, which it receives in context. New explanatory approaches have developed from a sociolinguistic perspective in metapragmatics, where social meaning is seen as a social index that emerges in context. Social index (the index meaning of a sign) refers to typified social situations and social roles of participants of a communicative act. Social meaning is actual­ized when it can be interpreted in social interaction as being used to express certain connota­tions. This analytical review presents a contemporary conceptual apparatus and toolkit that enables linguists to describe the social perspective in constructing meaning and interpreting meaning formation in social contexts. The empirical material for the analysis reflects the con­temporary sociocultural and discourse practices using the example of linguistic variability in Russian. The analysis of the Russian nouns “paradnaya” and “pod’ezd” shows how a lan­guage sign acquires a stable indexical character and is used to express social attribution.

We address the interaction of various interpretations of lexical items, which leads to a change in the correlation between signifieds and signifiers and the formation of new signs. Addressing the polysemic slogan ‘ОМОН-И-МЫ — АНТОНИМЫ’, we explicate the mechanism of semiotic Perpetuum mobile, that is, the cyclic recursions that allow simultane­ous actualization of various interpretations of this utterance. We demonstrate that the analy­sis of semantic relations in their dynamics requires the introduction of new theoretical con­cepts. The general principle of dynamic semiosis is demonstrated — that is the recursive rela­tions when a signified of one sign through intermediate operations (homonymy and synony­my) becomes a signifier of another and vice versa. In this semantic Perpetuum mobile, no single interpretation reaches the final point. It goes back to the previous state without produc­ing new meanings and signs but repeating the already passed cycle. Each of the co-existing interpretations returns to itself, demonstrating — in a paradoxical and tautological way — Luhman’s concept of paradox and tautology as two only possible states of a self-describing system. The same process, but being considered from the starting point demonstrates the par­adoxicality and tautology of the process of signification.

Today the so-called problem of discourse should boil down to (1) identifying relevant con­textual variables, (2) matching these to specific linguistic categories, and (3) operationalizing the former vis-à-vis the latter. Having posited this, the purpose of the article is twofold. In a more theoretical sense, the purpose is to outline one possible model of context each 'tier' of which is potentially related to certain linguistic categories and linguistic analytical toolkits. The suggested model has five tiers of contextual variables and two dimensions cutting through the five tiers. These dimensions are discourse (in the most general sense — as one of the 'moments' of social practice) and individuals (theorized here in two ways — in terms of cognition and as a complex of semiotic resources used to 'perform' identities). In a more prac­tical sense, the purpose of the article is to use (certain fragments of) the model to analyze dis­course. The discourse used for such analysis is a lifestyle instruction video from YouTube. Methodologically, the analysis draws on (1) the category of engagement as described in the Appraisal Model within Systemic Functional Linguistics and (2) the interpretation of dis­course/text as simultaneously invoking different discourses and genres, as suggested in the Faircloughian approach to discourse analysis. When seen as a complex semiotic happening, the discourse is analyzed in terms of it being part of the YouTube media platform. It is con­tended that as a result of the communicative technology in question, which has drastically changed participatory frameworks for mediated communicative events of this sort, a minimal discursive unit of analysis and interpretation should include, in addition to the text and ac­companying modalities (the discourse of the original video), comments made by other users (collaborative discourse). When seen more through the Foucauldian lens, the discourse of the video is analyzed as a discursive and generic hybrid invoking several social practices associat­ed with consumer culture, which can (to a certain extent) be shown to have (pre)defined the contents, the language and possible interpretations by the tentative addressee.

Axiological categories and the concepts they consist of have always been a major area of interest in science. The development of cognitive linguistics has opened new perspectives for the study of axiological events, categories and concepts within them. This article explores the structure of the axiological binary opposition truth-lie, based on the material of the English language. In English, the verbalised concept truth encodes information about both objective truth as well as its subjective perception and re-translation. A combination of methods — definitional, frame and conceptual analyses — makes it possible to investigate and model the structure of the frames TRUTH and LIE, identify their main slots and the type of conceptual information they encode. The results of the analyses suggest that the two frames have the same structure and the same number and type of slots. However, the conceptual content of the slots is different. From the conceptual point of view, the axiological binary opposition truth — lie is a continuum having an intermediate blend zone “neither truth nor lie”, incorporating the axiological paradoxes, which form the conceptual basis of manipulation.