2023 Vol. 14 №2

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 while systematizing and building a typology of universal languages. Of particular interest among the Avant-garde concepts is the ‘cosmic language of AO’ by the Gordin brothers, which builds on Khlebnikov’s ‘star lan­gua­ge tradition but aims for cognitive and linguo-social changes. The article compares the scien­tific and poetic universal languages and concludes that there is a pervasive tendency to­wards linguistic experimentation.

The article analyzes a fragment of the metaphorical system in the language of Russian poetry from the 19th to 21st centuries. Specifically, the analysis focuses on personifying metaphors related to the semantic class of ‘Language and speech’ and the lexical-semantic group Information search and receipt’. The study aims to determine the functioning of these lexical units in Russian poetry, identify the semantic classes of the objects of personification they are combined with, and establish their role in the organisation of the poetic text and connection with the poet's worldview. The research uses the Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus as its material and employs corpus, semantic field, and structural-functional analysis methods. The results show a higher frequency of words with the meaning ‘Information receipt than Information search’ as personifiers, with varying distribution over the comparison of ‘question-answer’ images. The analyzed figurative language introduces dialogism into the text, particularly through question-answer constructions with imperative and address, direct and indirect speech, creating unity and increasing dialogicity. The role of such constructions in organizing the internal dialogue and formulating the poet's worldview attitudes is revealed.

The article deals with the linguopoetics of deixis as one of the key mechanisms for expressing subjectivity in artistic communication. The aim of the study is to discuss the specifics of deictic words and constructions in experimental poetic discourse. The second part of the article analyzes the functions of personal, spatial, and discourse (textual) deixis in the visual layout of a poetic text (spatial design of verse). The material for analysis encompasses Edward Cummings’ experimental verse, conceptual poetry, US Language Writing, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s poetic texts. The study has found that the deictic means of language, interacting with the visual space of the poetic text, actualize the dynamic subjec­tivity of the aesthetic utterance. In poetic discourse, the spatiality, length and duration of the utterance (message) as such is a particularly active field of indexicality.

The paper examines the concept of multimodal expressiveness contributing to the general study of the expressive and emotive functions in belles-lettres texts. The author attempts to prove that in heterogeneous discourse expressiveness manifests itself as a meaning-making resource responsible for the form-content fusion. The analysis is carried out on the basis of two different kinds of theatrical discourse: theatrical performance and public play-reading. The author turns to theatrical interpretations of the plays by Alexander Vampilov, Alexander Kazantsev, Natalya Sadur, and to two public readings of the play “A man from Podolsk” by Dmitry Danilov, with the total duration of 740 minutes. The focus is on gesture as a pivotal semiotic resource of the theatre. The results of the comparative quantitative analysis show the difference (i) in the gesture patterns and (ii) the frequency of their usage in the two kinds of theatrical discourse. The qualitative results are obtained with the help of the parametric analysis which is a relevant tool for estimating the activity and functions of gestural modality and as such helps to reveal the specificity of meaning construal.

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 an examination of its metalanguage essence. Crossword descriptions reflect the outcomes of metalanguage consciousness operations, which aim to depict the elements of the semantics of encrypted nominations.

The unit of research is the crossword puzzle cell — the basic structural unit, which is formed by the unity of the description and the encrypted nomination. A description containing information about the encoded word forms a verbalized part of the crossword puzzle cell, and the encoded nomination is a non—verbalized part that is subject to decoding as a result of interpretation of the description. Encoding and decoding of the sign act as two components forming a dialogical unity of the act of indirect communication between the compiler of the crossword and its interpreter.

The purpose of this study is to search for and describe the features of distributive interpretants, that is, those descriptions that model the potential contexts of the use of encoded nominations. Distributive interpretants are formed on the basis of lacunized descriptions and appeals to the semantics of the enigma by updating the contexts of its use. The work on the language material revealed the principle of constructing pseudo-distributive interpretants. While maintaining a formal identity with distributive interpretants, they fundamentally form the search area of the encrypted word in a different way, not modeling the semantic context, but using parts of complex words with hyphenated spelling as terms of descriptions, as well as a variety of precedent names and utterances.

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 the reader’s interest. The comparative methods of empirical discourse analysis are used to identify and describe popularisation strategies. The results show that participants employed four strategies to transform academic texts: reduction N = 94), simplification (N = 81), contextualization (N = 58), and concrete elaboration (N = 17). The strategies tend to present the most significant text ideas, reduce reader’s efforts for processing, and introduce the reader into the discourse-world. The findings suggest that the strategies aim to enhance the optimal relevance and conceptualize reader’s interest through the communicative dimension of relevance.

This article explores the phenomenon of online political activism, specifically political blogging, from the perspective of the author's concept of prosumer activity. It focuses on the multimodal texts of websites that convey political messages using a range of semiotic codes. The study aims to demonstrate how the political identity of the addresser is encoded and expressed in the information product. The analysis results in a typology of multimodal texts, classified into three types based on their political identity and intended purpose. The first type comprises blogs that have a clear ideological basis that marks the political identity of the producer, with a ‘concentrated’ multimodal text. The second type includes blogs that do not reflect the author's political identity, with an ‘amorphous’ multimodal text intended for political consumption and entertainment. The third type encompasses blogs that transmit ‘disperse’ multimodal text, which presents an ideological basis but is focused on political consumption rather than identity manifestation in communication and action. The proposed typology is confirmed through a comparative study of politically oriented blogs and those that address political topics occasionally. The study also identifies mechanisms that increase the communicative potential and persuasive power of the ideological and semantic content, using semiotic and discourse analysis.

The article is devoted to the controversy around the painting by Hans Holbein the Younger "Christ in the tomb" and the novel "The Idiot" by Fedor Dostoevsky, where this picture is the central ekphrasis. The aim of the study was to analyze the current trends in the interpretation of Holbein's painting and Dostoevsky's novel, in their relationship with Christian dogmatics, canonical requirements for depicting the image of Christ, the biblical context, and to establish existing and possible interpretive models, their boundaries and perspectives. The article discusses the controversy about the painting by Holbein before Dostoevsky (Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gruner, Spazier, Lavater, Zschokke, Hegner) and its development in the novel "The Idiot" and in the disputes around it, presented by modern researchers of Holbein’s and Dostoevsky’s works. Particular attention is paid to the issue of kenosis, corruption and destruction, the significance of biblical allusions for understanding the meaning of the picture in the novel "The Idiot". The central argument of the article is that Holbein's painting actualizes the biblical context, carrying a provocative meaning that the crucified Christ himself had in the eyes of the world: "for the Jews a stumbling block and for the Greeks foolishness" (1 Cor. 1: 23).