Polynominativity of geographical objects in the linguocultural context
The article attempts to analyze the linguocultural factors contributing to the phenomenon of polynominativity—multiple names for a single object. This investigation employs toponyms as a case study. The exploration delves into several key factors that give rise to polyonyms: 1) linguosociocultural factors: these factors play a pivotal role in shaping subsystems of names, encompassing both official and unofficial, widely used and niche terms, as well as neutral and connotatively charged expressions...
‘People in Black’: Semantization of the concepts ‘sectant’ and ‘baptist’ in the anti-religious campaign of 1958—1964
In the post-revolutionary era, the population's adoption of a new political vocabulary demanded the Soviet authorities to play the role of the interpretant. They engaged in the process of assigning meanings to new concepts through mass media and fiction. Simultaneously, established concepts had to undergo reshaping to align with the new worldview of the 'Soviet citizen’. The transformation of the semantic structure of religious vocabulary, ideologically marked, reflected the shift in the fundamental...
Technological Metaphor and Communicative Models in Contemporary Russian Poetry
The article investigates the functioning of technological metaphor and communication models in poetic discourse. The aim of the study is to explore contemporary Russian poetry in its relation to digital technologies, employing cognitive-discursive and media-cognitive approaches. Technological metaphor is an implicit property inherent in both technical objects and poetic texts, which manifests itself on two levels: lexical-semantic and cognitive-communicative. The article proposes an approach to...
Speech acts and speech genres: the case of the compliment
This article is devoted to the speech act of compliment, which is treated herein as expressing the speaker's attention and partiality to their interlocutor. The similarities and differences between speech acts of compliment and praise are analysed, with the characteristics of compliment linked to the gender and age of the interlocutor. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of speech act and speech genre and the applicability of these notions in analysing the speech act of compliment. When...
Category of politeness: Russian imperative speech clichés in dialogue
This study identifies and characterises a class of lexical units — imperative speech clichés, exemplified by expressions such as krepis'! [hold on!], prekrati! [stop it!] or ne lez' [back off!]. It defines the concept of imperative speech clichés and investigates the role of pragmaticisation in their formation. The general properties of imperative clichés are described: most are either never employed with the negative particle ne [not] or are utilised exclusively with this particle. In speech communication...
Twenty-year olds know the word chuvak, or the second birth of a slang unit
This article examines the pragmatic meaning of the slang lexeme chuvak [dude], primarily when used as an address. The study aims to identify the components of this pragmatic meaning that contributed to the resurgence of the lexical unit in the 21st century after a period of usage decline and oblivion. Currently, the word chuvak is an integral part of youth vernacular.
The pragmatics of the word chuvak was analysed by methods of corpus analysis and questionnaire survey. It was concluded that...
‘Mother’, ‘wife’ and ‘friend’: semantics and pragmatics of an address
This article explores the semantic and pragmatic features of the word 'mother' when used as a term of address. It examines secondary uses of the term in literary texts from the 1780s to the present, a sample of 4,272 tokens, alongside dictionary definitions. The study revealed that, in different communicative situations, the term 'mother' can convey a range of sometimes contradictory attributes such as 'patronage', 'superiority', 'dependency', 'strictness', 'kindness', 'overfamiliarity' and other...
Functioning of the frame environment in various conceptual knowledge domains in the English language
This article presents the frame environment, exploring its conceptual structure by analysing how linguistic units function within immediate linguistic contexts across various conceptual knowledge domains. It is proposed to define and distinguish between the theoretical concepts of 'frame', 'cognitive context' and 'conceptual domain'. The English word 'environment' was selected to describe the manifestations of frame structure at the linguistic level. The etymology and definitions of the lexical...
Linguistic and sociological perspective on the perception of profanity in Moscow in 2024
The article presents the findings of a study on the attitudes toward profanity among Muscovites born between 1962 and 2011, all from families with higher education backgrounds. The research explores how respondents understand the term ‘mat,’ their views on societal restrictions regarding profanity, self-assessed frequency of using profanities and purposes for it, as well as the evolution of the attitudes toward profanity over different life stages. The study is based on the analysis of 20 interviews...
Solidarity strategies in adolescent communication
The study aims to reveal politeness strategies used in natural interaction within a particular community group. The article analyses excerpts from audio recordings of conversations of teenage male friends. The chosen interactional approach relies on Goffman’s notion of face and Brown and Levinson’s model of linguistic politeness, ethnographic methods of collecting data, and conversation analysis. The case study continues the discussion of gender and age aspects of politeness realization and communication...
Wanderings in Syllogistic Figures: On Kant’s Possible Cognitive Syllogistics
Kant’s treatise “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures” has logical, epistemological, and cognitive-psychological implications. These three perspectives on his conclusions are practically undifferentiated. The first part of this article discusses the logical and ontological-gnoseological content of the treatise in order to reveal the prerequisites for the cognitive interpretation of syllogisms. The second part is an attempt to explicate the treatise’s cognitive content, i.e. a systemic...
On the question of the syllabic system of versification: the poetic practice of Theophan Prokopovich
The study is devoted to the analysis of the accentual architectonics of the isosyllabic works of Theophan Prokopovich. The primary objective of this analysis was to examine the hypothesis regarding the gradual emergence of the syllabo-tonic system within the framework of syllabic verse. This hypothesis challenges the views of numerous scholars of versification, who argue for a revolutionary shift in Russian poetic tradition, attributed to the publication of Vasily Trediakovsky's 1735 treatise. Additionally...
Hieroglyphic sign weakening mechanisms
This article is the study of the Chinese characters through the semiotic weakening law. The hieroglyphic sign shapes the Chinese linguistic and cultural domain following the unique algorithm to code information. However, the linear principle of the Indo-European semiotics can hardly be applied to the Chinese semiotics with the hieroglyph sign at its heart. This makes the problem of the research obvious, that is to study cognitive processes that underlie the formation of the Chinese characters. The...
Сolour terms in the Russian short stories of the early XX and XXI centuries: a corpus study
The paper presents a comparative analysis of colour terms frequencies in the Russian short stories of the early 20th and 21st centuries. The study draws on the Russian Short Stories Corpus 1900—1930, word frequency lists compiled from the stories by particular authors (Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreev), and the Russian National Corpus. Two major statistic parameters are used, i. e. relative frequency (ipm) and rank distribution. The study focusses on the most common colour...
Thymiological reactions and their role in dialogues
This article examines the underexplored concept of thymiologic modality, which refers to the characterization of an object based on the degree of its significance. This modality is analyzed both as an independent entity and as a component of axiological modality, representing a higher or lower degree of relevance or significance. Thymiologic modality is explored through emotional reactions to perceived information. Surprise and indifference are considered emotions that exhibit independent thymiologic...
Pragmatics in the digital age: the Routinicon database
This study focuses on the Routinicon database as a digital tool for describing routines — a distinct class of formulaic phraseological units that represent reactions to or comments on standard extralinguistic situations. For instance, the formula Kogo ya vizhu! (Whom do I see!) serves as a reaction to an unexpected meeting, while Kto tam? (Who’s there?) is a standard formulaic reaction to a knock at the door. The collection, classification and study of units of this kind is of undoubted interest...
What is good: to the history of evaluative adjectives in the language of the early Soviet period
The article is devoted to the semantic evolution of the evaluative adjectives ‘horoshii’ and ‘plohoi’ (‘good’ and ‘bad’) in the early Soviet language. Through the use of party documents, propaganda slogans, letters to the government and literary texts of the 1920—1930s, the article reveals how these words turned into universal markers reflecting conformity to new social and political standards. The first part of the article analyzes the role of the adjective ‘good’ as a universal rhetorical tool...
Pragmatics beyond cognition: a perspective of Charles Peirce’s unfinished conception for (bio-)semiotics
The development of artificial intelligence and the new understanding of biomolecular processes for transmitting genetic information have emphasized the necessity to consider semiotic activity, that may operate autonomously from human cognition. In this regard, Charles Peirce’s latest conception of semiosis is of particular interest. For Peirce, semiosis is an interpretation that doesn't necessitate an external interpreter. A sign is viewed as a quasi-mind, and semiotic processes are carried out by...
The phenomenon of heterogeneity of the speech subject in German retrospective discourse
The article highlights the features of self-presentation of the subject of retrospective mental and cognitive activity recorded in the texts of memoirs of German-speaking writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The texts of fiction, which are fictional memories of the narrator and the main character of the narrative in one person, were also used as linguistic material. The novelty of the research is determined by the linguocognitive approach to the problem of interaction of the writer’s / hero’s...
The pragmatics of semiosis and linguisation
A hermeneutical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust’s attempt to interpret the meaning of the Gospel word λόγος, the first three verses of the Gospel of John, and the first three verses of the book of Genesis is proposed. The analysis of these hermeneutical constructions makes it possible to relate them—as well as the phenomenon of genesis itself—to the author’s model of recursion with inversive switching. The next step is to use this model to interpret and understand the pragmatic moment as the active...
Lexical and grammarical characteristics words with the root рыж- (red-) in the poetry of the first third of the XX century
The study examines the description of the artistic color space constructed with lexemes containing the root ryzh- (“reddish-brown” or “ginger”), which differ in their grammatical characteristics, in Russian poetry of the first third of the 20th century. It is revealed that color designations with the meaning ryzhiy were predominantly used by poets in 1916, with the most frequent usage observed in the poetry of E. Bagritsky, I. Selvinsky, V. Mayakovsky, Sasha Chyorny, and M. Tsvetaeva. Uneven frequency...
Creative laboratory of V.A. Sosnora (using the example of the poem Such merriment it was…)
The object of this study is the poem Such merriment it was... by V. A. Sosnora, one of the prominent writers of the second half of the 20th century. The article analyzes the poet’s creative process in working on the text. The study draws on the poem’s draft version, which has not previously been examined by researchers of V. A. Sosnora’s work, as well as versions presented in Soviet and post-Soviet publications. Changes introduced by the author into the work are documented and analyzed. Phonetic...
A part outside the whole? (To Anton Zimmerling's article “Really: syntactics without semiotics?”)
... modeling of the lexical-statistical structure of a variable text: on the example of "The Legend of the Battle of Mamaev"]. PhD thesis. St. Petersburg (in Russ.).
Labov, W., 1978. Denotational structure. In: Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon. Chicago, pp. 220—260.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York.
Lakoff, G., 1986. Classifiers as a Reflection of Mind: The Experiential, Imaginative, and ...
Poetics of the deconstruction of Reinhard Jirgl’s text: A translational perspective
This article explores Reinhard Jirgl’s concept of literary writing, which uses linguistic and textual deconstruction, alphanumeric encoding, and intra- and intertextual strategies. Semiotic and discursive analyses allow identifying lexical, syntactic, and semantic elements of the structural and functional performativity of Jirgl’s texts. His prose exploits the enormous poetic potential of the alphanumeric code, the aesthetics of narrative simultaneity and hypertextuality, and the fragmentedness...
Who is the one who uses the human language? On Alexsander Kravchenko's article "Language and the Nature of Humanity")
The article is devoted to the polemic with Alexander Kravchenko regarding his thesis that the way out of the protracted crisis in linguistics is to use a systemic approach to linguistic semiosis as biological adaptation. The author argues that linguistics is not in a state of crisis but rather in a state of stagnation. Overcoming it presupposes an intensive methodological search that infinitely expands the horizons of permissible views rather than the use of a system approach that is inadequate...
Gorod and grad in the Russian poetry of the 18th century
Urban motifs in Russian poetry have not yet become the subject of comprehensive investigation in terms of the evolution of poetic conceptualization of the world, the frequency, semantics and syntagmatics of the key lexemes — 'gorod' and 'grad'. Meanwhile, the analysis of the poetic, ethnic and linguistic picture of the world, closely connected with diachronic lexicology, phraseology and grammar, allows important conclusions concerning the history of the national semiosphere and conceptosphere based...
Theatrical interpretation of a literary work from the standpoint of semiotic creativity
The study presents the results of linguosemiotic analysis of sign correlations between the play “The Elder Son” by Vampilov and 22 theatrical performances based on it (The International on-line Festival “The Elder Son — 55”, November, 2020). The play and its multimodal interpretations are viewed as parts of a unique communicative space. These parts may be specified as the original communicative situation and the ‘derivatives’ characterized by semiotic creativity of their authors — the playwright...
Translation and the ‘soft’ bridges of communication
Translation Studies scholars, on the whole, have struggled to reconcile abstract, metaphorical concepts of translation with the notion of translation as understood in the commercial world of communication, that of a product to be obtained through quick, efficient and cost-cutting processes of transfer across verbal languages. Yet both ideas of translation imply exchanges of perspective between domains, cultures and senses and are inspiring conceptually, artistically and socially. Bonds between...
Pechora scrolls: St. Augustine’s miracle of the revelation of the Elder
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...
Reframing paroemias of the coronavirus discourse
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...
Translating philosophical aesthetics: Peritext as a window into the translator's mind. Part 2
Providing space for elucidating key translational issues is not a mundane practice but a privilege only hand-picked texts enjoy, philosophical writings among them. The challenge of translating philosophical discourse is widely recognized but scarcely explored. In this article, translation of philosophical texts is regarded as a procedure of knowledge transfer from one intellectual space into another and of knowledge-making through reconceptualization of key terms. This process is made partly observable...
Translation of new sociological terminology: challenges and solutions
Rapid development of concepts in modern sociology leads to the emergence of a large number of neological terms. Currently, the academic language of Russian sociology sees an active expansion of foreign language terminology and translated terms reflecting changes in the English-language social picture of the world. However, the lack of consistency in intra-lingual and inter-lingual translation of new terms may complicate the understanding of this terminology by representatives of multilingual academic...
“Čut’ živye, v noč’ osennjuju / My s ochoty vozvraščaemsja…” Secondary predicate in Nekrasov’s poetic texts
The main aim of the article is to examine the grammatical and stylistic functions of the predicative attribute in the poetic work of Nekrasov. The study contributes to the general ‘grammar of poetry’, which has been proposed and developed by Roman Jakobson. The study shows that Nekrasov often used the predicative attribute and it constitutes one of the specific features of his style. Grammatically extended adjectival, participial and adverbial phrases, frequent in Nekrasov’s poetry, cause additional...
Interaction of comparative structures and their elements in modern russian prose
The article explores the interaction of comparative constructions in modern prose. The main objective of the study is to determine the types of interaction between metaphors and similes in the texts of modern Russian prose. The material of the study is the works of Buida, Vodolazkin, Ivanov, Ilichevsky, Matveeva, Pelevin, Rubina, Slavnikova, Sokolov, Sorokin, and Stepnova. The authors employed the methods of description, comparison and the structural-semantic analysis and also took into account...
Translating Philosophy
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2. Cassin, B. and Apter, E. S., eds., 2014. Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon. Priceton UP.
3. Foucault, M., 1966. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris.
4. Foucault, M., 1971. The Order of Things — An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York.
Translation of postmodern terminology in the philosophical works by M. Foucault, J. Baudrillard, and J. Derrida
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...
On the Pushkin text in the poetry of Perestroika
This article is devoted to Perestroika poets referring to the Pushkin text as a ‘tuning fork’ in reconfiguring poetics. The study aims to show that, in this case, intertextual connection create a special text-within-a-text. The corpus, intertextual, and compositional methods are used to analyse Pushkin-invoking texts by Yuri Arabov, Vladimir Druk, Timur Kibirov, and other poets. It is concluded that these authors perceive Pushkin’s poetry as a lexicon whose units can be used for building countless...
An early edition of Andrey Bolotov’s memoirs (from the archives and manuscripts section of the State Historical Museum)
The history of the creation of Andrei T. Bolotov’s memoirs has been little studied. In particular, the stages of his work on this text are not entirely clear. This article is an attempt to shed light on one aspect of this problem. Bolotov’s personal fund (No. 349) in the Archives and manuscripts section of the State Historical Museum contain a manuscript of Bolotov’s memoirs entitled “Part 2”. It differs significantly in its essential characteristics (paper, design, size, composition, title, division...
The journal “1812”and the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812
... popularizers initiated the foundation of the Museum of 1812 and the Borodino panorama, painted by F. A. Roubaud for the 100th anniversary of the Patriotic War of 1812. On the one hand, publications in the journal reflected the prevailing worldview and the lexis used at that time. On the other hand, articles of the journal disseminated a set of values amongst the readership, having an equal or lower educational, cultural and social status. The knowledge of the language of the journal and the specificity ...
Verbal aggression in modern poetry: conventional and unconventional functioning of discourse markers
The article examines the specifics of speech aggression in poetic communication. Special attention is paid to the unconventional functioning of discourse markers of aggression. The aim of the study is to analyse aggressive verbal behaviour in poetic communication and identify distinctive characteristics of expressing aggression in everyday discourse. The research methodology includes methods of linguopragmatic, linguopoetic and discourse analyses. The author studies discourse markers of verbal aggression...
Ambiguity matters in linguistics and translation
... resolve the ambiguity or make wrong inferences since each recipient bears a different combination of cognitive, axiological, social, professional and gender attributes.
Apresjan, Yu., 1974. Leksicheskaya semantika: sinonimicheskie sredstva yazyka [Lexical semantics: synonymous means of language]. Russia, Moscow: Nauka (in Russ.).
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/
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...
The text in the context of the Tartu Semiotic School: problems and prospects
In this article, I discuss problems associated with the emergence and development of the concept of text, which is central to the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (TMS). The first problem is the interrelation between statics and dynamics. From the perspective of classical structuralism, the language system is a static entity. The generation of a text, however, is a dynamic process. Therefore, language should contain the possibility of dynamics. The TMS offered a twofold solution to this dilemma....
The formation of the narrative and the performative in public communication
Since the British philosopher John Austin, narratives and performatives have been considered as opposite concepts covered by the generic concept of speech act. At the same time, these concepts were separated according to whether a narrative, inducement, a description, or an imperative was present in the text. Similar to the narrative, the performative is created under pressure from various external factors associated with the system of public communications, to which the author is exposed, and...
Hybrid texts as a form of interaction between avant-garde artistic and political discourses
...
Saunders, D., 2002. Literacy and the Common Law. A Polytechnical Approach to the History of Writings of the Law. Available at:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/
GriffLawRw/2002/5.pdf [Accessed 5 August 2019].
Shaw-Miller, S., 2014. Opsis Melos Lexis: Before and Around the Total Work of Art. In: J. H. Rubin and O. Mattis, eds. Rival Sisters, Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, 1815—1915. pp. 37—51.
Sinagra, A., 2009. Lo statuto della Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro: tra storia, diritto ...
The media image of San Escobar in the space of fictional worlds: a socio-semiotic perspective
The article deals with the process of structuring the concept of the fictitious state of San Escobar from the perspective of social semiotics, including the broadly understood context and media environment for constructing the image. The creation of the internet memes was inspired by a lapsus linguae of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Witold Waszczykowski. Major changes in the communicative space, the dominance of digital media resources and multimodal messages, the hegemony of visual culture...
Ontological taxonomy as a means to inventory the elements of the semantic metalanguage of cognitive analysis (based on E. V. Rakhilina’s monograph Cognitive Analysis of Object Names (Semantics and Collocations))
In this work, I address the problems of inventorying the semantic metalanguage used in cognitive analysis to describe the meaning and collocation characteristics of object names. I establish correlations between elements of the semantic metalanguage to explain the meanings of linguistic units and speech sections in E. V. Rakhilina’s monograph Cognitive Analysis of Object Names (Semantics and Collocations) (Rakhilina 2010). I focus on the units of the semantic metalanguage, i. e. words and phrases...
Discursive practices of the Russian diaspora in Estonia: language contacts
In this article, I use the concept of discursive practices to consider the speech practices of the Russian diaspora of Estonia. The findings of the study suggest the existence of an invariant discourse generated by an exemplary member of the diaspora. Such a discourse has formal (borrowings, code-switching, etc.), semantic (referential shifts, semantically re-oriented vocabulary, etc.), and pragmatic features. The results of the diasporic speech analysis show that the key components of a typical...
A. G. Baumgarten’s aesthetic-semiotic concept
In this article, we consider the semiotic concept developed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a founder of modern aesthetics. We describe the principles of the semiotic theory, as expressed in Baumgarten's Metaphysica, particularly in the parts ‘Ontology’ and ‘Psychology’, in which he introduced the basic semiotic terminology. We pay special attention to the general context of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica. This context had determined the characteristics of the semiotic ideas that he developed later. In...
History in Transcription and Transcription as History: Charles Bally in Soviet Linguistics
This article describes the results of a systemic study into the history of conveying the name of the Swiss linguist Charles Bally by the means of Russian transcription, in the 20th-century linguistic discussions. The author reconstructs the history of introducing Charles Bally’s works into Russian and Soviet linguistics, particularly, in the context of the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course of General Linguistics. The article analyses the variants of transcribing the name Bally in the...