Philology, pedagogy, and psychology

Processes taking place in society affect how lexemes are understood and interpreted at different historical periods of a linguoculture. In this article, we use German dictionaries and today’s press to consider the notion of Toleranz as a value constant and lexical-semntic field of German linguoculture. In our study, we relied on the DWDS German text corpus and the periodical Die Zeit. We established that the historical peak of the use of the lexeme Toleranz had been reached in 1992, whereas the in­crease of 2015 was associated with the surge of migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

This article is based on the postulate that there are objective and subjective forms of time. I consider means to explicate subjective time in literature, using the novel Generation Golf zwei by the contemporary German author, Florian Illies. In this autobiographical novel, Illies goes heavy on self-irony to draw a psychological portrait of his generation, which he calls the ‘golf generation’ and thus emphasises what values it holds. The author’s contemporaries, the youth of the 1990s, have a peculiar perception of objective time, shaped by the then socio-political and economic situation in Germany. I conclude that, in the novel, subjective time is usully expressed linguistically by not only traditional temporal markers bus also various textual modifications of the ‘TIME – RESOURCE’ metaphor and the ‘TIME – EVENT’ metonymy. An important landmark in the life of the generation was September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. That day heralded a transition of German society from spiritual hibernation to a new mode of measuring historical time.

In this article, I consider how the environment affects the functioning of youth slang. I aim to explore how elements of today’s world are reflected in the vocabulary of young people. The objects of my study are units of today’s German youth slang, particularly, those identified as the most popular by surveys of the German publishing company Langenscheidt. I consider the main periods in the formation of German youth slang in the 20th/21st centuries and review the events that affected its formation. I provide evidence that there is a link between events taking place in the lives of young people and in their country, on the one hand, and neologisms that emerge in youth slang, on the other. I list slang words and expressions most popular among the youth in 2014–2018 according to Langenscheidt. I describe key trends, events, and elements of life today that have found reflection in the language of young people. I conclude that the most popular slang units are the neologisms that provide the clearest and most comprehensive picture of a phenomenon and display the attitudes of young people to it. The fact that each year a new slang unit tops the list testifies to the volatility and changeability of the structure of youth slang.

In this article, we describe approaches to studying the verbal threat, which exist in the recent Russian and international research literature. We examine the essence of the verbal threat from the perspective of speech act the­ory. We identify the major content-related components of utterances contain­ing threats and explain how they differ from commissive acts. We conclude that the speech act of threat is a synthetic speech-act structure, whose core el­ement is directive and whose auxiliary element commissive.

This article considers the functional significance of the attributive combination ‘captain's daughter’ as an essential and integral component of the semantic space of Alexander Pushkin’s novel. Placed in the title, it functions as the key sign of the work of fiction since it makes it possible to interpret implied meanings. Unlike the other, more frequent, lexical and grammatical units used as nominations in the text (‘Masha’, ‘Marya Ivanovna Mironova’), ‘captain’s daughter’ explicates the image of both the main character and her father – captain Mironov. An ‘invisible hero’ in history, he is a man of high moral qualities: kindness and candour. Therefore, ‘captain’s daughter’ fulfils the role of the textual dominant and presents the essence of the novel.

Studying tourism branding as a process of communication requires a thorough analysis of both naming and descriptive texts available through information resources. A well-thought-out strategic platform attracts the target audience and ensures the smooth functioning of visual and verbal channels to create a bright and unified image in the world market. In this article, I perform a linguistic analysis of language means used in successful promotions of design hotels and cheap hostels and identify the algorithms that help to draw the attention of travellers. This study uses original English texts published on the websites of tourist destinations.

This review is devoted to the linguistic legacy of the Voronezh syntactic school, which was founded by the renowned scholars Igor Raspopov and Anatoly Lomov. We discuss the ideas that were shaping this area of grammatical research from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. Our focus is the theoretical precursors and stepwise development of the Voronezh syntactic school. We emphasise the considerable heuristic potential and didactic value of the findings obtained by the Voronezh scholars.

Our comparative study focuses on Mickiewicz’s Saint Petersburg poems (Part III of Dzyady, 1832) and Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (1833). We explore the eschatological figurativeness of the two texts and the eccentricity, as Yuri Lotman put it, of the Saint Petersburg space. We conclude that Mickiewicz’s eschatology of Saint Petersburg is linked to the biblical myth of Babylon. Nominal rhetorical detachment permeates his perception of the Saint Petersburg flood. Pushkin’s position consists of two elements: the presence of a bystander in the text and compassion for Evegenii who falls victim to the flood. Pushkin combines an apologetic statist perception of ‘Peter’s own creation’ with tragic existential realisation of the neglected state, in which the ‘little man’ lives in the Saint Petersburg space.

In this article, I investigate the poetics of the novel The buried giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and consider artistic images that tend to actualise mytho­logical poetics in the literary text. I pay particular attention both to the re-creation of elements of mythological origin in the context of the novel and to new semantic meanings emerging through the reconsideration of the myth in the mind of the author. I address the problem of defining the genre of the novel, which has not yet received a single identification in the literature. My analysis shows that, in the novel, mythopoetics is a means to create a metaphorical image of reality. The theme of the text and its key motifs are most fully expressed in the complex interactions among links existing within this reality.

Using the rock opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1975) and Hip-hopera: Orpheus & Eurydice (2018), we analyse interpretations of the ancient myth in today’s popular culture. We demonstrate how the plot and motif transformations of the pre-text bridge the gap between history and modernity. In both the rock opera and the hip-hopera, the ancient theme of descent into the kingdom of the dead in the name of love merges with its semiotic double: the neo-mythological plot about the symbolic death of the Creator under the yoke of profane mass culture. We explore how the ideology of the rock and rap subcultures affects the general semantics of the new myth of ‘mass culture Hades’. We consider secondary semiotisation of the concepts of contemporary musical culture in terms of archaic models of thinking. The revision of the mythological plot by assigning to it relevant sociocultural meanings is viewed as an experience of aesthetic legitimation of a work of mass art and its inclusion in a broader cultural context.

In this article, I analyse the significance of using non-verbal com­munication when teaching languages to visually impaired students. I consider in the context of learning activities the malfunctions and distortions of non-verbal behaviour mechanisms in blind and visually impaired students. I present my earlier tested strategy for overcoming physical, psychological, and language barriers by learning languages.

In this article, I consider teaching professional foreign languages to future bachelors of physical education. I analyse the regulatory, academic, and research literature to summarise the theoretical findings of the study, which seeks to explore and compare requirements for bachelors of physical education and consider the competency-based and activity-based approaches to the development of universal competencies in students when learning a foreign lanaguage.