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This article addresses the problem of identifying hidden borrowings in the Russian language of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The authors pay particular attention to expressions that convey meanings whose semiotic 'form' utilises linguistic elements pre-existing in the recipient language. The mechanism of embedding a semantic calque into an already existing model of signification is illustrated using the example of the collocation kak po mne and its interaction with the original Russian marker of personal opinion po mne, which has a long history of use. A corpus study and contextual semantic and comparative analysis led the authors to conclude that the collocation kak po mne is a calque of the Anglo-Americanism 'as for me / as to me', competing with another form of hidden borrowing — po mne [for me / to me]. Coexisting in the recipient language with the native expression po mne, the hidden semantic calque appears as its structural-semantic variant with an intensifier.

The article also presents survey data from native Russian speakers, who predominantly classify kak po mne as a vulgarism or colloquialism. This categorisation persists despite the widespread use of the expression by educated individuals across various functional domains, including media, literary translations and film dubbing.

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 unit were analysed using English lexico­graphical sources and texts and contexts from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Based on this foundation, the frame environment was constructed, encompassing the knowledge structures that define the concept of ‘environment’ and shape its linguistic expressions across various specialised knowledge domains. The au­thors hypothesise that while the generalised frame structure remains unchanged, the con­tent of its slots transforms under the influence of the conceptual domain, which affects the un­derstanding and structuring of information by a linguistic personality. The content of fra­me slots aligns with the conceptual domain, whose information scope guides the selection of lin­guis­tic means while producing a verbal message. In turn, the linguistic means describing the con­tent of the slots serve to reconstruct the frame in the process of understanding. Text ana­lysis has shown that the frame structure does not change substantially, with some slots pos­sib­ly remaining inactivated within a particular conceptual domain. Such a structure facilitates the connections of concepts and, consequently, aids in understanding and focusing attention when addressing background knowledge.

This article examines the image of 'flowers of evil' as an imago image — an imaginary image of a real object. The term 'imago' was first used in this sense by Carl Jung in 1912. The work proposes a novel approach to investigating the image of 'flowers of evil'. The com­pa­rative historical, analytical and psychoanalytic methods of text examination revealed that, in his novel À rebours, Huysmans espouses Baudelaire's celebrated image, representing it pri­marily as a notion of something bizarre, extraordinary, transmuted and dangerous. This is achieved through the reception of the image of 'flowers of evil' embodied by Huysmans in a series of vegetative appearances, such as the collection of exotic plants, the lotus in the hands of Salome and the nidularium seen in a dream. It is concluded that Huysmans uses phy­to­nymic images to demonstrate his belief that his decadent contemporaries, personified in the cha­racter of Jean Desessent, perceive Baudelaire's work superficially, inaccurately and too lite­rally, making them accomplices in the 'burial' of everything associated with 'old' values. Therefore, as a poetic image, Baudelaire's 'flowers of evil' align with the explored 'imago' methodology as they generate multiple interpretive chains representing independent acts of creativity.

This paper is the first attempt to interpret the visual 'construemes' by the constructivist poet Alexei N. Chicherin, published in the anthology Mena vsekh (Moscow, 1924). 'Const­rue­mes' can be considered the most enigmatic artefacts of the Russian avant-garde. Although 'construemes' can be easily confused with meaningless visual zaum ('the transra­tio­nal'), Chicherin's actions and the very nature of his personality prevent one from inter­preting 'con­struemes' as actionist endeavours to scandalise or a 'play on nonsense'. Analysis of the poet's treatise Kan-Fun (Moscow, 1926), which required finding the key to deciphering the 'const­ruemes', reveals the positivist nature of Chicherin's visual-phonological exercises. In the trea­tise, the poet argues for the primacy of the eye and vision. He illustrates synthetic 'signs' or 'pictograms' with the quotidian example of propaganda posters, capable of influen­cing mil­lions more effectively than words alone.

The study emphasises the enigmatic nature of the titles of Chicherin's books, the Nie­tzschean subtexts of his self-presentation, encrypted allusions to the esoteric and magical tra­dition of the Tarot, and religious symbolism. Sixteen illustrations help understand Chi­che­rin's logic behind the creation of his four 'construemes', including the most mysterious com­position called 'Raman' ('the shortest Kan-Fun Novel in the world'). The structure of this text synthesises the verbal, visual-graphic, acoustic (phonological symbols) and musical (notes) levels. The article also examines Chicherin's proven techniques: the appropriation of the sacred dimension and self-presentation as an actor possessing genuine knowledge and ca­pable of competing alone with the entire literary environment.

This article delves into the early era of 'digital poetry', focusing on poems from the digital poetry collection First Screening (1984) by bpNichol — a poet renowned for his 'movies of words'. Two poems from this collection — 'Letter' and 'After the Storm' — were initially published in print, coming out in 1967 and 1973, respectively. The poet's creative journey from crafting 'poem-pictures' to producing 'poem-movies' sparks inquiries into the contrasting subjective frameworks of printed poems versus their digital adaptations translated into a media language akin to cinema.

The author suggests analysing the layers of media mediation in printed and digital texts as distinct material conditions of communication prompting readers to encounter a 'moment of intensity', as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht put it, and undergo a creative experience of es­trangement enabling them to connect with the subject behind the text. The variance in media mediation shapes specific subjective structures. In both cases, the subject behind the text is a submedial subject (Boris Groys). The structures of literary and cinematic imagination allow the recipient not so much to relate to the author as to acquire an unexpected co-author, a sub-medial subject capable of replacing the author's intention with another intention or compro­mi­sing the former. In printed text, identification is possible with the submedial subject, whereas in digital text, disidentification is feasible. The evolution from literary text through digital cinema to interactive digital forms highlights the difference between the recipients of literary and digital texts. The recipient of a literary text brings to life the narrative or a lyrical 'self', actively enga­ging with the text through imagination. The recipient of a digital text identifies with an 'ava­tar' capable of making choices that influence plot development but is less effective at enriching un­folding scenes and events with additional meanings.

There is a dearth of empirical literary studies devoted to digital literature, primarily due to the poor development of a methodological framework for analysing digital texts and a lack of clarity as regards the text/meaning-generating capacity of the new communication channel, the language of digital texts' literary meta-description and the limits of freedom in interpret­ing such volatile texts. This article attempts to answer these and other questions, providing a semiotic understanding of communication in the tech environment. It also proffers the idea of new pragmatics as the effect of volatile polycode digital text, interface and reception trajec­tory. It is shown that the instability of the digital channel plays a meaning-generating role in digital semiosis.

The following principles are proposed as theoretically and methodologically significant for literary analysis of digital texts: a digital text does not preexist the act of communication; the meaning of an entire polycode digital text emerges at the intersection of words, images, video and audio; the activity of the recipient, in addition to that of producing meanings, includes material actions of text co-creation; the new tactility of communication should is a mandatory object of digital text analysis; when posted online, the recipient's reflection enables reconstructing the mechanisms guiding the reader through the text; meta-position in digital text analysis has the quality of relativity. A possible course of digital intermedial text analysis is proposed based on these considerations.

At the core of the contemporary literary process is the search for an effective extratextual communicative situation, which is especially relevant for books of poetry, whether in paper or electronic form.

This article examines current practices of delivering poetic texts to readers through auditory perception. It focuses on contemporary French poets active between 1990 and 2022, representing three different groups and movements; in Russia, they are known only to a narrow circle of specialists. The study proposes a typology of in-situ and ex-situ strategies for delivering the sound of a poet's voice to the reader. To this end, audio and video recordings by Christian Prigent (born 1945), Michèle Finck (1960) and Anne-James Chaton (1970) are examined. Analysing the presentation of poetic works by comparison and juxtaposition leads one to conclude that authors pursue two strategies: individual playback and reading (book and CD sets) and group sessions (theatrical performances and poetry festivals). Beyond the customary dichotomy of the author's versus the actor's reading, one can distinguish hybrid types of voice preservation via delegation: incorporating a recording of the author's recitation into a theatrical production (Finck) and computer processing of the author's voice (Chaton). Contemporary poetry, especially French, persists in its quest for new codes for accessing the reader, seeking innovative forms of conveying vicarious experiences with transformative potency. Prigent, Finck, and Chaton fully harness the power of the sounding voice in their poetic work: distinctive intonations, prosody, and timbre become auditory 'anchors', substituting the mnemonic techniques of traditional poetic systems. The ancient power of vocal impact is augmented by modern technologies. Modern poetry, moving beyond its linguistic laboratory, seeks to transcend into other forms of art, gaining support from music and painting while exerting a polymodal impact on the addressee's imagination.

This article examines texts by the modern British poet Brian Bilston from the perspective of their semantic and syntactic organisation and the lines of the author's investigation into paralinguistic, i. e. visual, elements. To this end, it draws on contemporary research into complex communication objects — multimodal texts. The study provides an overview of the principles of new media: modularity, numerical representation, automation and variability. Formulated by Lev Manovich, these precepts find reflection in Bilston's poetic practices. It is shown that traditional paralinguistic means, such as the spatial arrangement of components or the use of colours, shapes and figures, are used to compose iconic texts where the actual similarity of the sign and the referent comes to the fore. A non-standard technique is described that utilises the font as an element of traditional polymodality to label the actor. The use of new media elements — computer interfaces, data visualisation and emojis — in poetic and meta-poetic functions is explored alongside an examination of conceptual metaphors illustrating reflection on a subject's individual experience — reflection couched in digital reality terms, such as 'filter', 'format' and 'function'. As for the referential correlation between verbal and visual components, the role of emojis is demonstrated in devising the structures of parallel, complementary and substitutive syntax in literary, public and advertising Internet communication. It is concluded that the choice between traditional and new visual components reflects how form and content interact in a text. The espousal of digital reality elements is linked to the poet's interest in the features of communicative relationships. The significance of the communicative format associated with the conceptualisation of digital reality is shown to perform a text-forming function in Bilston's poetic practices.

This article discusses the results of a survey underlying a reconstruction of ideas about tact and tactlessness in Russian communicative culture.

The author considers the concept of tact to be a communicative strategy within the cate­gory of politeness that is closely related to native speakers' notion about the boundaries of private space. Thus, tact is defined as a communicative strategy driven by the speaker's desire to avoid infringing on the private space of their interlocutor. Moreover, ideas about the boundaries of private space and tact are among the most significant elements in describing a national communicative culture.

This study focuses on the tactless question as a typical way of violating private space boundaries. The survey questionnaire was based on interviewee behaviour observations, with one interviewee labelling the interviewer's questions tactless or indecent. It was established that the presence of an immediate addressee and a mass audience sets the parameters for eval­uating public statements in terms of their acceptability or face-threatening potential.

This study aims to analyse the informants' assessment of 'tactless' questions proposed in the questionnaire as regards their appropriateness in public communication. The survey re­sults are divided into the following thematic blocks corresponding to communication risk zones: age, family and marriage, religion and sex. The quantitative findings provide infor­ma­tion on the social norms intuitively classified by Russian native speakers as preventing intru­sion into private space. They also give an insight into the effect of age characteristics on sta­tement evaluations. Informants' responses tend to exhibit ambiguity in assessments, high­ligh­ting the variability of contemporary perceptions regarding tact and tactlessness, thereby ref­lecting shifts in social norms.

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 nuanced semantic traits. The metaphor of family is extended into a broader social context and can transcend societal boundaries to enter the realm of abstraction.

The cluster model by George Lakoff, which allows for the coexistence of transfer models in secondary usage, is suggested as a tool to describe the pragmatics of addressing a person as a 'mother'. However, unlike Lakoff's works, this study applies the cluster model not to idealised cognitive models — those of birth, genetics, upbringing, and others — but a system of the usage of the word 'mother' as a term of address encompassing diverse metaphorical transfer.

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 within the slang of the 1950s' stilyaga subcul­ture, the term chuvak developed strong associations with American music, particularly jazz, and American culture overall. These associations, alongside other features of the pragmatic component, such as designation as slang, contributed to the re-emergence the word at the end of the 20th century. At the time, the word was extensively used in the Russian dubbing of American films to render the English word 'dude', thus becoming familiar to younger genera­tions.

This article describes the vocative use of first names. The literature cites addressing a person by a given name as the preferential mode of politeness when the addressee's name is known to the speaker. The study aims to clarify this idea, demonstrating limitations on using first names imposed by the interactional context. It also seeks to examine the role of given names and terms of address in general from the perspective of linguistic politeness. The data used in the study consists of fragments of spontaneous interactions from the Russian Nation­al Corpus and native speakers' metapragmatic commentaries collected by the author. The methodology draws on Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's theory of linguistic polite­ness. The literature review and data analysis revealed two interactional contexts where ad­dressing by a given name is foregone or does not seem to be preferential despite the speaker's acquaintance with the corresponding term of identification: communication between family members and service encounters. For some pieces of data, a description framed in terms of linguistic politeness appears to be suitable. Yet, a first-name address can function as not only a mitigating device but also a potential face-threatening act. Finally, there are many instances where politeness issues do not seem relevant. In these cases, it seems appropriate to describe the vocative function as a background operation to maintain social relations.

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, they function as reactions-impulses, i. e. the addresser uses one when reacting to the addressee's previous remark or their behaviour, simultaneously en­couraging the addressee to perform an action or refrain from it. A significant part of impera­tive cliches, especially reactions-impulses, are formed with perfective verbs. The use and func­tioning of imperative clichés in speech are central topics in describing the category of polite­ness, particularly in impolite and anti-polite communication.

This study aims to examine the functioning of imperative speech clichés in terms of the category of politeness. The data used in the research consisted of categorical appeals used in speech acts to interrupt or prohibit contact. A collection of examples from the Russian Na­tional Corpus — about a hundred tokens — was compiled to this end. The method of lexico­graphic description was employed to prepare a test article for the otstan'! [leave me alone!] speech cliché. Linguistic description and dictionary representation of imperative speech cli­chés are central to a comprehensive description of the category of politeness category.

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 considering a compliment as an independent act, the con­cepts of 'speech act' and 'speech genre' serve as synonyms. When a compliment is part of a complex utterance consisting of several different speech acts, 'speech act' and 'speech genre' refer to disparate concepts. This article examines cases of compliment usage as an independent act (speech genre) and within other speech genres, such as requests, gratitude expressions, consolations and condemnations, where a compliment amplifies or mitigates the speaker's intention.