Evaluating the impact of integration processes on the ethnopolitical competition of languages in the Baltic Region
In the literature, the impact of integration processes on language learning and usage is traditionally evaluated either through the prism of sociolinguistics or soft power. This article proposes a new conceptual approach based on measuring various aspects of competition between languages by the language integration and monopolization indices, on the one hand, and the polylingualism coefficient, on the other. The approach is applied to the situation in the Baltic Sea region of the EU. The article...
Signs and senses as an epistemological problem
The semiotic problem of the triad “sign – meaning – sense” is discussed as a methodological problem caused by philosophy of external realism and the representational theory of cognition based on it. Reification of linguistic signs, along with the erroneous view of the nature and function of language as a communication tool rather than the mode of existence of humans as living (cognitive) systems, impedes scientific explanation of both language and linguistic signs. As an alternative...
Сorrelation of the oral and the written in topolect poetry
The paper describes the practice of creating poetic texts on lects that possess a problematic linguistic status. The author proposes using ‘topolect’ as a universal term for such entities, which allows them to be placed in a special category of language systems that occupy an intermediate level between the standard and the rather homogeneous territorial dialects in a kind of multilingualism that is characterized by the distribution of functions between idioms. The analysis of the poetic tradition...
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...
Really: syntactics without semiotics?
I discuss the relation of linguistics and semiotics on the basis of the Old Russian discourse particle TI1 ‘indeed’, ‘verily’, ‘truly’ discovered by Andrej A. Zaliznjak in 1993. Linguistics and semiotics are different research programmes: the first one deals with specific features of language structures, while the second one discusses general characteristics of all sign systems, from a perspective of interpreting most or all of them as secondary respective to natural language. Formal...
The Conjunction Functions of the Particle tolko: A Conjunction Particle vs a Conjunction Analogue
This article considers the conjunction functions of the logical and modal particle tolko. A study into the functioning of logical and modal particles led the author to identify the basic syntactic positions that determine the functional and grammatical status of the lexical units studied: the particle, the conjunction particle, and the conjunction analogue. The conjunction behaviour of a particle can be manifested to a greater or lesser degree. The particle/conjunction relation forms a gradient....
Action-thoughts and the genesis of time in linguistic semiosis
The genesis of time is explained in the spirit of constructivism combined with the activity approach to cognition. The cardinal temporal categories of present, past, and future are discussed in terms of action-thoughts understood as elementary units of activity whose structure is determined by linguistic semiosis. Husserl’s tripartite model of the phenomenology of time (prime perception, retention, protention) is applied to the analysis of the subject’s experience of his actions. It is demonstrated...
The dialogue between linguistics and the poetic avant-garde in Russia in the 1920—1930s: experiments with a universal language
The article explores the concept of a ‘universal language’, which was prevalent in both linguistics and the poetic Avant-garde in Russia during the 1910s-1920s. This period was marked by socio-political reforms that led to new realities and concepts. As a result, societies studying international languages, such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and Novial, were formed, and many scholars including Jakob Linzbach, Nikolay Yushmanov, and Evgeny Shmurlo attempted to create new international languages...
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...
Ideology of English monolingualism as the basis of the US language policy
The article deals with the ideological foundations of English monolingualism in the U. S. A. The author analyses the arguments used by supporters and opponents of this ideology. The author also describes the history of monolingualism, as well as its function and sources.
1. Хантингтон С. Кто мы? Вызовы американской национальной идентично-
сти. М., 2008.
2. Baker C., Jones S. P. The Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism....
On the problem of cultural reference of proverbs (the Russian proverbs with images of clothing)
This article explores proverbs as signs that preserve, transfer, and develop meanings rooted in the ethnic culture. The author investigates the ways cultural semantics is expressed in proverbs featuring clothing items. Another focus is the ways to refer to garment elements. Clothing items are universal realia; they form concepts, mythologemes, symbols, gauges, stereotypes, etc. in the realm of ideas about the world. These ideas are interpreted within different fields of human spiritual life, for...
On the less obvious manifestations of the poetic function: a translator’s view
The paper examines the interaction of the poetic function with the emotive and expressive functions in belles-lettres texts. The authors attempt to prove that the poetic function should not be equated with the aesthetic one. The former overlaps all the above-mentioned functions, but alone bears the responsibility for the form-content fusion. The paper focuses on the less evident mechanisms of the poetic function, beyond the obvious effect of tropes and figures of speech. Not unlike meiosis, its...
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...
Daniel Everett and Cultural Linguistics
This paper deals with the views of Daniel L. Everett as exemplified in his major works Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes and Language: The Cultural Tool. The aim of this study is to analyse the connection of these works to various schools of thought and to examine the possible link with linguistic cultural studies. Everett’s definitions of language and culture are contrasted with those of various schools in linguistics. It should be noted that Everett does not appear to use the term linguistic worldview...
Simultaneous interpreter in multimodal dimension: the role of gestures in moments of non-interpretation
The paper investigates multimodal behavior of simultaneous interpreters during ‘non-interpretation’ regarded as interruptions in the flow of speech due to difficulties. Video recordings of a TEDtalk on biology interpreted from English into Russian by 24 simultaneous interpreters are analyzed with the help of quantitative and qualitative methods. The distribution of gestures with the moments of ‘non-interpretation’ indicates that referential (representational and deictic) gestures serve the...
English as a lingua franca — a paradigm shift for Translation and Interpreting
The global spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has caused a fundamental change to translation and interpreting (T&I). Translation and interpreting used to revolve around bilingual mediation between native speakers and native listeners. In interpreting, in particular, more often than not, source speeches are now produced by non-native English speakers. The impact of this development has the potential to uproot our traditional understanding of T&I. This article sets out to describe how ELF...
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...
Where and how meanings emerge
The discussion aims to identify the interpretive mechanisms that provide an interface between text and context (between language and the world, language and culture, language and society). It is a multi-level system of interfaces connected by inversion and recursion relations and operations. We identify this system as a pragmasemantics. It also acts as an interface platform for correlation/transformation of intra-system semantic units and extralinguistic objects within a set of possible worlds...
Levels of context: how textual analysis becomes discourse analysis: the case of Internet lifestyle media
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...
“They call the main entrance a porch”: social meaning in semantics and metapragmatics
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...
Typographic landscape in urban space: a sociolinguistic approach
This paper suggests a sociolinguistic approach to typographic landscape analysis. Typography is discussed as a semiotic resource with meaning-making potential. The paper argues that typographic variation provides dynamic indexical links to social practice. It obtains its ‘social voice’ and becomes an integral part of the social context in which it is perceived as typical and able to generate particular socially loaded meanings. This research is in line with contemporary social semiotics, interactional...
“Noise” as a key to semiosis: the brain and culture (40 years later)
The article explores the context important for the analysis of Lotman’s talk at the seminar on the problem of semiogenesis and functional specialization of cerebral hemispheres as a model of intellectual processes, which was held in Tartu. Forty years later, the author analyses changes in the viewpoints on the proposed model, taking into account the data of experimental neuroscience. The article emphasizes the fundamental value and topicality of Yuri Lotman’s ideas on the production of meaning...
On poetic emotiology in poetry and beyond
The article presents material supporting the thesis about the discourse register of emotions in their movement from poetic communications to non-poetic ones. The subjects of the description are emotives — linguistic signs of emotions. The part of the article that deals with poetry interprets emotives in multiple aspects: in the aspect of the grammar of poetic language and in their figurative representation. Within the frames of such grammatical categories as the imperative and subjunctive moods...
Kantian Philosophy and ‘Linguistic Kantianism’
The expression “linguistic Kantianism” is widely used to refer to ideas about thought and cognition being determined by language — a conception characteristic of 20th century analytic philosophy. In this article, I conduct a comparative analysis of Kant’s philosophy and views falling under the umbrella expression “linguistic Kantianism.” First, I show that “linguistic Kantianism” usually presupposes a relativistic conception that is alien to Kant’s philosophy (although Kant’s...
Hybrid texts as a form of interaction between avant-garde artistic and political discourses
This paper explores hybrid texts as a special type of text that forms within ‘inter-discourse interaction’ and relates to the ‘convergence of discourses’. The analysis focuses on the interaction between avant-garde art and political discourses, which have been in close contact since the 20th century and have common typological features. The main methods used in this study are the linguistic pragmatic method, the linguistic poetic method, and discourse analysis. The article proposes a definition...
Immanuel Kant and the problem of communicative constructivism
This article focuses on the relation between the subject and object in theory of cognition. Special attention is paid to the role of social communication in the construction of the real world. The author stresses that the language communication plays an important role in this process. Thereby, it affects human cognition as well as all existence. When discussing this phenomenon, the author uses the methodology that was symbolically described by Kant as the Copernican turn. Wilhelm von Humboldt was...
The sociolinguistic aspects of Russian-Spanish -Catalan multilingualism: The case of a bi-ethnic polylingual family in Catalonia
This article considers the phenomenon of multilingualism in the case of a Russian-Catalan family living in Spain in the autonomous community of Catalonia. The author defines the terms ‘bilingualism’ and ‘trilingualism’. The sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia is examined. The article analyses the Russian-Spanish-Catalan trilinguism in the observed family. Special attention is paid to the development of multilingualism in children and adolescents. Situation-dependent code-switching in the...
Language policy of Estonia: achievements and the future of education in the Russian language
Estonia’s language policy sparks serious debates in the academic community, further complicated by the politically charged nature of the topic. In the works of Estonian authors, there is unequivocal postulation of Russia’s influence on Estonian society, while relatively little attention is given to the Russian-speaking minorities themselves. Domestic researchers focus on the negative aspects of integration and language policies—violations of the rights of national minorities, the assimilative...
The Swedish institute’s scholarship policy as a soft power instrument
This paper examines how soft power, nation branding and academic cooperation came together in the scholarship policy pursued by the Swedish Institute (SI) from 1995 to 2023. An investigation of the organisation’s materials, scholarship statistics and feedback interviews with SI programme alumni suggests that the implementation of the scholarship policy was erratic during the study period. A comprehensive analysis of the Institute’s efforts was carried out to describe the relationship between...
Cultural discrepancy within Russian-speaking community in Israel
The objective of the present research is to discover and explain a variety of cultural preferences within the Russian-speaking community in Israel. We juxtapose veteran immigrants of the ‘1990 wave’ (including children and teenagers who came with their parents, so called 1.5ers) and representatives of the ‘Putin Exodus’ who arrived in the country in 2014—2018. The divergence in preferences and attitudes was revealed thanks to the discourse, semantic and comparative analysis. The research...
Formal terms of reproach in Russian discourse
This article is concerned with the formal terms of reproach in Russian discourse and the corpus methods of their identification. Theoretically, it builds on the thesis that there are ‘true’ reproaches that can function autonomously in discourse and be adequately understood outside their context. Practically, the article describes the corpus search for formal terms of reproach. Methodologically, it abandons the synthetic outlook of pragmalinguistics, which dominates Russian linguistics, and treats...
Translation of sociolect texts
A moment's reflection suffices to convince one that no language is homogeneous, being represented by a set of language variants or language existential forms, reflecting the heterogeneous character of the national culture. Notwithstanding variable nature of language, linguistic theorizing has been mostly based on standardized languages forms, rather than on natural speech dialects. The present research addresses the fundamental issue of variability within a language and aims at studying the...
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...
The role of native language in learning Russian as a foreign language
This article addresses the role of the native language in learning Russian as a foreign language. The author describes the role attributed to the native language by the modern methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language in the training process or preparation thereto. It is concluded that addressing the native or an intermediate language is methodologically justified in the process of learning Russian as a foreign language if it helps to increase the efficiency of the training process.
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The development of everyday language in the German-speaking countries in the framework of the sociolinguistic concept of language evolution
This article studies trends in the development of the German language and their manifestations in spoken language. It is established that, under the influence oral discourse conditions, the antinomies of language development are resolved in regional spoken languages predominantly in favor of the system (usage vs system), the speaker (speaker vs listener), expressivity (regularity vs expressiveness), and the code (code vs text).
1. Едличка А. Теория языковой культуры...
The Russian language in modern Estonia: functioning, learning, features
This article summarises the observations of different authors about the modern condition of the Russian language in Estonia, outlines the emerging areas of research on the use of the Russian language and the features of language policy. The features of diaspora speech are described from the perspective of words and phrases, grammar indicators, language reflection, time, place, features of speech practices, and evaluations. The author considers the influence of language situation on the basic psychological...
Conceptualizing emotions through discourse: a pragmatic view on the reader's interest
The paper adopts a sociopragmatic approach to the study of emotion processes and investigates discursive traits of the reader’s interest. The field of written popularization was examined to establish how it conceptualizes the reader’s interest through discourse structures. The text materials were obtained experimentally. They consist of 104 pairs of expository text; each of the pairs includes a text published in an academic source and a popular science text created by the participant for provoking...
Distributive interpretants in the crossword metalanguage
In this paper, we study such a specific product of enigmatic discourse as a crossword puzzle. The powerful potential of this text is manifested in its ability to accumulate and translate cultural meanings and values, which explains the recent appearance of a large number of works on the study of linguistic, cultural, structural-semantic and cognitive-discursive features of the crossword language. The study of the ontological nature of the crossword, as undertaken in this research, is grounded in...
On the functional definition of concepts and linguistic meanings: the embodied/grounded approach
The article suggests a way to overcome two well-known problems of embodied/grounded theory of cognition: the impossibility of strict differentiating modal and amodal symbols, and the difficulty in defining abstract concepts/simulators (abstract lexical meanings). The proposed functional approach is based on the dichotomy 'perceptual (external) vs. functional (internal)' that goes back to Ivan Sechenov. These cognitive units are shown to play fundamentally different roles. The function — the...
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...
Latvian policy on the Russian-language education
The article studies the development of Russian-language school education in independent Latvia from 1992 to 2020, as well as the process of reforming this system by official authorities. At the time of declaration of independence and withdrawal from the USSR, a bilingual education system which was formed in Latvia, made it possible to get education at all levels (from kindergarten to technical school and university) in both Latvian and Russian languages. The rise to power in the 1990s. nationalist...
Intonological aspect of the vocal form of the language (on the example of the Russian choir)
The article studies intonation features of vocal form of the language. The melody of national opera music reveals inherent prosodic corrrelation with the language intonation units and their features. The two cognitive systems, namely music and language, function via intonological models (the ones characteristic of both music and speech) of perception. Although the vocal music melody of a national language is not fully identical to speech intonation patterns acoustically, it still includes a number...
The moving boundaries of news translation
News translation has been investigated more systematically since the mid-2000s. Since then, it has kept pushing the boundaries of translation studies by asking such questions as the following: Can we study multilingual practices that do not necessarily have an identified source text? If so, what do we analyze and compare? Can we call these practices ‘translation’? How do we integrate multimodality into our traditionally textual analyses? This article formulates tentative answers based onrecent...
Transposition — retelling — translation: the destiny of Areopagitica in Slavia Orthodoxa
The article undertakes a conceptual analysis of the challenges associated with translating works from the Corpus Areopagiticum, a collection of theological treatises attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite from the 1st century. However, these works are unequivocally associated with early medieval Eastern Christian mystical-theological thought, presumably from the turn of the 5th—6th centuries. These texts first appeared in the Slavic Orthodox area in 1370, and subsequent translations emerged...
Where does the method come from? On the self-sufficiency of semiotic objects
The article aims to illustrate the inadequacy of viewing semiotics as a mere extension of linguistic methods applied to non-linguistic objects. It highlights the dual and recursive nature of semiotic terms. Semiotics' objects are not independent signs but rather the processes involved in establishing sign relations, specifically semiosis and semiopoiesis. Given the dynamic character of semiosis, signs should not be regarded as fixed objects from a predefined vocabulary; instead, they should be...
Semantic transformation of the noun mamochka: from ‘wife’ to ‘cannon’
In the semantic theory of Gottlob Frege, the content of a linguistic sign is determined by the connection between the meaning and a set of subjective perceptions that form the meaning. Our study aims to reveal the influence of individual perceptions of the meaning on the extension of the semantic structure of a word, using the kinship term ‘mamochka’ as an example. The article focuses on instances where the word ‘mamochka’ is used in fiction and, to some extent, Internet texts. The article...
‘Definition of poetry’: Frege vs. Jakobson
This article presents a comparative analysis of two approaches to describing the reference within poetic statements: the pragmasemantic approach, which builds upon Gottlob Frege's ideas of the poetic sign as "a sign with meaning but without reference," and aesthetic-functional theories of poetic language linked to Roman Jacobson's concept of the poetic function. The pragmasemantic interpretation of the referential capabilities of a poetic sign explores questions regarding the principles...
Poetical reduplications in Alexander Vvedensky’s fiction
The article is devoted to the study of the poetics of reduplication in Alexander Vvedensky's fiction texts. The aim of this research is to analyse the functional range of reduplications at different textual levels, from the lexical to the thematic. Reduplication is understood as one of the most important tools of Vvedensky's linguopoetic experiment, aimed at the 'revision' of the ability of language to signify and represent the world and its basic semiotic principles. For Vvedensky, the non-normative...
Cities, mountains, roads... (the image of a city in formulaic paronymic collocations)
The article analyses the collocations of the lexeme 'gorod (city)' with its paronyms — words that are pronounced or written in a similar way, not necessarily connected etymologically. These collocations, which appear in paronymic attraction and repeated many times, are called formulaic. The research presented in the article confirms the assumption that the stable paronymic collocations do not unite random words but a type of mythologemes — 'gorod’, ‘gora’ and ‘doroga’. They...
Mental lexicon and language consciousness: similaritiea and discrapencies in research methodology
The article discusses the similarities and differences between the research methodology of the mental lexicon and language consciousness. Most studies of language consciousness do not differ in any significant way from studies of the mental lexicon, and this is not recognized or is hushed up by their authors. The problem of their differentiation is connected with the definition of language consciousness. The author of the article defines it as a psycholinguistic concept that shows how the internal...