2020 Vol. 11 №4

This paper is a retrospective analysis of the development of the journal "Slovo.ru: Baltic Accent" since 2010. There have been significant changes in the editorial policy of the journal and the variety of themes has become remarkably rich.  The main approach to the formation of the content of the journal has changed from polydisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity. The journal is now designed for a much wider readership, representing different fields of science  (linguistics, literary criticism, history, philosophy, semiotics, etc.), incorporated into a single methodological complex. The journal unites different paradigms of modern humanities and beyond.

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 in poetic speech acts, where aggression can be expressed explicitly and implicitly. The study reveals specific strategies of expressing verbal aggression in poetic communication, which can include the self-referential criticism (through verbal aggression directed at the language of the poetic utterance, the actor of utter­ance, the poetic utterance as such and also the perceptual mechanism). The author studies the formation of aggressive message in poetic discourse and its subjectification.

The article analyses the emotive aspect of the production and perception of the speech act of threat and the specificity of the perception of this act by a modern native speaker of Rus­sian. The act of threat is an instrument of influence exerted on the listener. Its effectiveness depends on the strength of the negative emotions of anxiety, fear, etc. initiated in the listener. At the same time, the production of threatening statements is often associated with the speak­er's emotional state, which in some cases can serve as a catalyst for imperative influence. The speech act of threat, being an element of conflict discourse, contradicts the traditional princi­ples of productive communication and the legal norms of any developed state. In everyday communication, a verbal threat can be regarded as a way of implementing communicative intentions that are completely justified from the socio-ethical point of view. For a modern Russian speaker, threat is not a communicative taboo and can be deliberately used in conflict situations related to the protection of human dignity, life, social values, etc.

This article explores the expression of impoliteness of Internet users in confrontational threads. This approach involves the identification of speech aggression markers typical of a certain type of discourse. This makes it possible to define the roles and attitudes of partici­pants in the conflict interaction. The authors employed methods of discourse analysis and corpus tools of data collection and marking. Seven confrontational threads in the communities of the social network "Vkontakte" were analysed. The authors identified language markers of the switch from cooperative to confrontational speech interaction. The authors investigated the typical roles of communicators in a confrontational thread, and observed the dynamics of using aggressive language tools for each of the proposed strategies. The article describes typi­cal situations for the confrontational threads: reliability of the information presented, lack of the user's intention to check facts, and the violation of spelling and punctuation rules. Con­frontations around these situations tend to lead to more complex conflicts and are character­ized as motives typical of impolite communication.

The appeal to death is a type of argument that either explicitly or implicitly invokes hu­man finitude. This rhetorical device contributes to the credibility of requests, wishes, etc., or blocks communication. The illocutionary power of the appeal to death is determined by the means it uses, which range from inductive generalisation and deductions to approaching the limit of this generalisation, to the threat of going beyond the existential boundaries of the dis­course, to the problem domain losing its existential status, and to the threat being carried out. All of them make communication insignificant and the subject, or even the opponent, non-existent. This style of argumentation is peculiar to ‘pre-logical’ communities where the logical culture of social communication is underdeveloped and unwanted, where an instrumental appeal is made not to the law but force, not to freedom but arbitrariness.

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 reproach as a strictly linguistic object that has dis­cursive manifestations. This approach uses methods of corpus linguistics, which ‘visualise’ abstract models through arrays of real-life language data.

The paper presents a statistical study of the use of variant forms of Russian personal names. It is shown that Russian names can be divided into two classes: names with full and short forms contrast with names that only have one neutrally used form. For names that have a distinct short form, the frequencies of full and short forms can relate to each other in differ­ent ways. This depends on various factors, such as the length of the full name and the gender of its owner: for longer names and female names, the short form is more common. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, it is proved that the use of the full name as a form of address has been increasing in the last 15 to 30 years.

Using the method of corpus analysis, this article explores the history of the Russian hon­orific gospoda and related forms of address: damy i gospoda, gospoda-tovarischi, and other noun-noun and adjective-noun collocations (gospoda publika uvažaemye gospoda). It draws on examples from literature to demonstrate that although, contrary to popular belief, the honorific damy i gospoda is not a neologism of the end of the 20th century, it was mar­ginal to pre-revolutionary speech. It is also shown that, albeit rarely, the word gospoda was used before the Russian Revolution to address a mixed company. Abandoned after the Revolu­tion, the honorific underwent a revival in the second half of the 20th century when it was used more often to address a mixed company than it had been in tsarist times. Probably, this was accounted for by extra-linguistic factors. Special attention is given to the use of the honorific gospoda in periods of transition: at the beginning and end of the Soviet era and after the collapse of the USSR.

This article explores when and under what circumstances the words starik and starina emerged as terms of friendship in standard Russian language. These terms were often used by male characters in the prose of the Khrushchev Thaw — students, scientists, and engineers. It was initially assumed that these words had become forms of address at that time. Analysis of data from the Russian National Corpus shows that these terms of friendship date back earlier than that. Starik was used to address a male friend in the 19th century and starina in the 1920s—30s. Decades apart, the two words started to function as terms of friendship in a very similar way. Both were used at first to address an elderly stranger. At some point, they turned into means of language play and speech stylisation to finally lose their connection to folk speech and the semantics of age. The first one to complete the transformation was the word starina. As to starik, it apparently began to be used as a term of friendship in lan­guages of groups.