2025 Vol. 16 №1

This work is the result of methodological reflection related to the comprehension of more than two hundred years of experience accumulated since the secularization of linguistics, and the formation of a reasonable forecast regarding the near and medium-term development of linguistic science. The development of linguistics is determined by the dynamics of para­digms. In understanding the latter term, the author follows the tradition laid down by Kuhn, taking into account the nuances of its transfer to the linguistic soil formulated by academician Stepanov. The paradigm forms a deep methodological framework that has a direct impact on the goals, subject and methods of research. At the same time, the paradigm shift reflects the development and continuity of linguistic knowledge. The driving force behind the develop­ment of linguistics is the competitive struggle between the ideas of anthropocentrism and systemocentrism. To explain the mechanism of paradigmatic cyclicity, the author refers to the concept of the paradigm life cycle. The article demonstrates the signs of "aging" of the current anthropocentric paradigm. Modern linguistics is on the threshold of a new methodological search. At the current moment, prerequisites are emerging for methodological transfor­mations, the result of which may be the creation of an integral (universal) research paradigm capable of providing complete and adequate comprehension of language. Neostructuralism is considered as a variant of the implementation of the integral paradigm, as a linguistic plat­form that provides a return to the fundamental positions of systemocentrism while preserving the most productive ideas of anthropocentrism. The research principles of neostructuralism encompass holism, taxonomy (emphasis on taxometric approaches), semiotics (focus on the semiotic nature of language), multidimensionality, functionalism, and textocentrism.

The formation and operation of the global information environment, along with the increased speed of information dissemination driven by advances in information technologies, present a significant challenge to modern society. This acceleration leads to excessive cognitive load, which diminishes the ability to critically evaluate and analyse received information. This article explores the conceptual processes that underpin manipulative influences within media discourse. Through a conceptual analysis of contemporary English-language media, using the News on the Web corpus, the study identifies and describes key types of conceptual transfers that serve as the foundation of manipulative acts. The cognitive mechanisms of analogy, metaphorization, emotionalization, profiling, attribution, framing, scripting, and their numerous combinations form the basis of manipulation in modern English-language media texts. These processes are characterized by dynamism and polydomain interaction, making their identification and analysis even more complex. The dynamic nature of conceptual transfers is driven by the functioning of the experiencer's conceptual system, which continuously processes sensory data at pre-conceptual, conceptual, and category levels. Polydomain transfers enable agents of a manipulative act to craft layered conceptual narratives that target various levels of perception and interpretation, thus making manipulative effects more difficult to detect. The study of conceptual transfer in relation to manipulation is particularly crucial in the context of the global information environment, where media serves as the primary channel for the dissemination of news and opinions. A deeper understanding of the cognitive and linguistic aspects of this process is vital for developing strategies to counteract manipulative practices. This research provides an in-depth analysis of various forms of manipulation and proposes new approaches for investigating their impact on both the collective and individual experiencer.

This paper investigates the semantic adaptation of new borrowings in Russian, addressing a gap in research on this topic. The relevance of the study stems from the ambiguous and often negative public perception of the increasing number of borrowings in the Russian language. The study aims to classify these borrowings and identify the under­lying causes of the borrowing process. The central hypothesis is that the semantic adaptation of borrowings is determined by the types of cognitive categorization employed. Two types of categorization are described: logical categorization and non-logical categorization. Logical categorization involves the rational structuring of phenomena within a native speaker’s worldview, while non-logical categorization reflects an emotional-evaluative perception of reality, expressing various emotions through borrowings. The research draws on several sources, including the National Corpus of the Russian Language, media publications, Rus­sian dictionaries, statistical data from the Yandex search engine, and the results of a psycho­linguistic experiment involving 106 native speakers. In the experiment, participants were tasked with interpreting stimulus words, providing insights into how borrowings are unders­tood and categorized. The study's primary outcome is a typology of borrowings, differentiated by the organization of their semantic relationships. The typology includes borrowings that denote new phenomena in reality, borrowings used as substitutes for synonymous native phrases, and borrowing-doublets. Logical categorization establishes hierarchical semantic connections for borrowings, while non-logical categorization conveys emotional and eva­luative attitudes. The findings indicate that logical categorization is predominant for most bor­rowings, whereas non-logical categorization applies to a smaller subset. In some cases, these types of categorization can co-occur. The study concludes that cognitive categorization plays a crucial role in the semantic adaptation of borrowings, offering new insights into their integration into the Russian language.

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 terms. A multifold comparison has revealed differences due to the author’s personality, historical context, and literary form. Thus, considerable divergence is shown to exist in the individual writers’ preferences for the particular colour terms. However, the differences come down to a unified rank distribution in a sample from the Russian Short Story Corpus 1900—1930, containing stories by a few hun­dred authors. While not affecting the intra-group rankings of colour terms, the turbulent his­torical events seem to have spurred their ipm index. A hypothesis is put forward to account for this, based on an earlier paper. The analysis of the 21st century material draws on a sample from the Russian National Corpus, containing short stories produced in 2000—2023. A com­parison between the two samples has shown that the most frequent adjectives have retained their intra-group rankings while the ipm index has largely dropped. Included in the paper is also a comparison between Ivan Bunin’s short stories and poetry, exemplifying the impact of literary form on the colour terms’ frequencies.

This paper discusses the notion of hybridity as related to text genres. The study pinpoints a particular kind of hybrid genres referring to texts that mix and combine in their structure the features of two or more different genres but maintain their primary genre identity. This kind of genre mixing results inter alia in an advertisement that is shaped as a chat in internet, private talk or recipe but sustains its genre status as an advertisement. The analysis is based on advertisement texts functioning as hybrid genres in modern Russian socio-cultural prac­tice. The theoretical framework of the study is in line with modern investigations in text lin­guistics, text typology, theory of speech genres, persuasion conceptions. The paper discusses the central issues and trends in the study of text genres and indicates related terms that have mainly been used in research on text hybridity and genre blending. It is shown that hybridi­zation of the genre becomes a communicative tool in the persuasion strategy of the communi­cative agent, which aims at influencing a person's or group's attitude or behaviour towards some idea and encouraging to perform post-communicative actions.

The article considers death denial as the crucial constituent of the concept ‘denial of grief’. The research aims at studying peculiarities of actualization of death denial in humorous discourse. The data comprise recordings and scripts of 50 stand-up specials and 20 comedies. The relevance of the research is supported by increasing number of humorous works in recent years where death is actualized as well as by insufficient covering value characteristics and comic objectification of death. The article demonstrates that death denial is actualized through cunning, cowardice and faith. In humorous discourse cunning is expressed through intention to deceive death using such ethical anti-value solution as acquiring eternal life. Immortality is obtained with the help of magic potions and rituals or in some unexpected way. The study shows that unexpected immortality is oppressing the person and causes attempts to escape it. In humorous discourse faith as interpreting death as intermediate stage is usually assessed negatively. Thus, either the very possibility of life after death or people’s certainty of being in heaven can be ridiculed. In case of actualizing cowardice through escaping death, the only popular comic plot is making the dead look alive in order to use him like the alive one.

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 objective of the research is to identify the basic mechanisms of the hieroglyphic signs weakening. This research is based on the works of Charles S. Peirce, Charles W. Morris, Yuri S. Stepanov, Sergey G. Proskurin, Viktor P. Va­si­liev, Lev S. Vygotsky, Xue Jin, Li Feng, and others. The analysis of 214 characters has revea­led the basic mechanisms of weakening. The general scientific methods are as follows: gra­pheme analysis to study the structural components of the hieroglyphic sign, semantic and etymological analysis to trace the evolution of the form and meaning of a character. The re­search has revealed the following weakening mechanisms: simplification, complication, prese­rvation. These changes in form trigger semantic variations based on metaphoric and meto­nymic shifts. To study the mechanisms of sign formation is of significance because it enables us to solve the problems in intercultural communication. The investigation of the cognitive processes that underlie the formation of the hieroglyphic code allows us to get a deeper insight into how the native speakers of the Chinese language categorize reality.

We advocate an idea that a necessary condition for a dispute about truth amounts not to the carriers of non-ideal logical thought, but to a variety of approaches to reconstructing the logical form of conditional reasoning, which implies diversification of methods for solving logical tasks. The relevance of the study is conveyed by discussions about logical aliens - fan­tastic mad-humans, in which Frege embodied his idea of the impossibility of denying the nec­essary nature of logical laws in the acquisition of truth, in the context of the remarkable diver­sity of formal logical tools for modeling argumentation and reasoning. Based on modern stud­ies of conditional reasoning, using the example of Onegin’s conditional reasoning from a let­ter to Tatyana, we show that there are different ways of reconstructing it, including compet­ing ones. In the spirit of Frege, we construct the concept of logical penalists - non-ideal think­ers of our “home circle”, who, due to their limited intellectual resources, are sometimes con­tent with not the best results in reasoning and who turn out to be the only candidates to par­ticipate in a dispute about truth, as such disputes are possible with neither ideal thinkers nor logical aliens. The concept of logical penalists allows us to illustrate the idea that disputes are possible due not to the differences in opinions among humans, but to the variety of ways to justify them.

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, the study aims to compare the theoretical recommendations outlined in Prokopovich's poetics and rhetoric with his own experiments in versification. The most common form in Theophan's poetry, as well as in the works of the Virsheviks—his predecessors and contemporaries—is the thirteen-syllable verse. This form is genre- and theme-diverse, appearing in odes, epigrams, inscriptions, occasional poems, and humorous poem cycles. However, it is less metrically ordered compared to other types of syllabic verse and exhibits the greatest diversity in accent placement. It actively demonstrates the "inverted rhythm" described by A. P. Kvyatkovsky and shows the least tendency toward a "fixed" rhythm. Eleven-syllable verses, found in epitaphs, psalm adaptations, messages, epigrams, and occasional poems, are somewhat less common in Theophan's lyrics. Octosyllabic and heptosyllabic verses are rare, while a single example of a decasyllabic verse is present in his body of work. The "incorrect" lines in isosyllabic verses turn out to be marginal, which, along with the increase in the number of repeating accent patterns in Theophan's poems, speaks of the high development of the verse technique in the post-Petrine era.

The norms of the future syllabo-tonic system gradually, slowly, but steadily developed in the depths of verse poetry. Thus, Theophan’s 11-, 10- and 8-syllable verses, as well as non-isosyllabic cants and arrangements of psalms, demonstrate a high (reaching the level of ideal trochaic, iambic, anapestic and dactylic lines) degree of rhythmic orderliness, supported by anaphoric repetitions, internal rhymes, rare inter-verse hyphenations, which together bring the rhythm and intonation of Theophan's elegies, cants and songs closer to the melodious syllabo-tonic verse, while the thirteen-syllable verses and some humorous heterosyllabic verses are saturated with conversational and declamatory intonations. The results of the analysis confirm the reformist role of Theophan Prokopovich in the field of ordering syllabic versifica­tion, which evolved in the direction of metrotonicity.