Philology, pedagogy, and psychology

The threat is one of the most effective ways to influence an interlocutor’s be­havior because it directly affects his or her personal interests. De­pending on the con­text, a threat may take various forms, which can be at odds with the traditional idea of both the structure of a threat and its linguistic markers. Threats are frequently used in contemporary po­litical discourse, which is gov­erned by norms and conventions. The radicaliza­tion of communication is a re­sult of social and economic problems as well as geopo­litical conflicts. This pa­per analyses what forms the speech act of threat can take in the political dis­courses of two Europe­an countries: Germany and Spain. It attempts to identi­fy similarities and structural differences in the realization of speech acts of threat at the lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic levels by politicians in these countries. The study relies on sixty-six speeches of German and Spanish poli­ticians: Alexander Gauland, Alice Weidel, Mariano Ra­joy, and Íñigo Méndez de Vigo.

This article considers motives behind the breaking of language norms in persuasion in the space of English political discourse. The study aims to de­termine the linguistic factors influencing the development of the semantic content of language anomalies and encouraging the use of the latter in public speech. The study found that the ability of linguistic deviations to acquire and convey relevant stylistic and pragmatic meanings in the discourse space en­hanced the semantic content, ex­pressiveness, and emotionality of these mean­ings. All this creates conditions for anomalies to function in political texts as expres­sive stylistic means that have a high potential for pragmatic impact on the addressee. It is concluded that, in giving political speech special liveliness and expressiveness, language-norm-breaking attract the attention of listeners, arouse their emotions, and make them think and embrace the intent of the speaker.

This article considers irony as an independent textual category contain­ing the author’s judgement and facilitating the expression of the author’s pragmatic attitudes in a literary text. The study investigates the potential and functioning of parenthesis structures as syntactic markers of irony in Niko­lai Gogol's works. The assessment categories used to express the pragmatic at­titudes of the author are identified.

Using texts of the journalistic genre of portrait interview, this article considers the ways to express the evaluative modal meanings of veraci­ty/falsity and willing­ness/possibility/obligation by the medium of intonation. The study identifies the role of prosodic variation in achieving the pragmatic objectives of the mentioned genre.

In the framework of cultural linguistics, this article explores the informa­tional field of proper names, specifically, toponyms. The study focuses on oeconyms, in particular, the official names of villages in one of the Smolensk region’s most important districts – Roslavl. A total of 314 names were ana­lysed to describe relevant cultural codes, which are based on various frag­ments of reality. The purpose of this work is to identify and characterise the cultural codes that are embedded in the oeconyms of the study area. Proper-name creation is interpreted as a special instance of the encoding of extensive historical, cultural, and national-specific information, using onomastic mark­ers (in particular, the stems of oeconyms). Various classifications of toponym­ic cul­tural codes are considered, and a typology best describing the compiled empirical material is proposed. In accordance with this classification, a quali­tative and quantitative analysis of the oeconyms of the study area is carried out.

The creation of a corpus of historical documents requires developing cri­teria for the scientific evaluation of the former based on a number of genre pa­rameters that make it possible to structure a text array and present it in an electronic search environment. An important feature is the genre and type of a documentary text, which are established using a set of elements essential to documents. Since in histor­ical documents these elements are not always highlighted in the text, the marker of the genre can be speech formulas performing the same function. This article proposes the following parameters of the genre: document ti­tle, addressee, the date of the document, the place of the document. Their ap­plication to documentary texts is demonstrated using regional historical doc­uments – messages and reports comprising the 18th-century document collec­tion of the Mikhaylovsky Stanitsa Ataman executive office of the Don Cossack Host.

This article considered Beckett’s French short stories through the prism of philosophical and aesthetic foundations of modernist music. The rejection of tonal hierarchies by dodecaphonists to transcend the limits of the traditional sonic semiosis can be compared to Beckett’s aspiration to go beyond the ‘fetish’ of words. The study emphasizes similarities between the creative systems of Beckett and the Second Viennese School/neoclassicists. The commonalities range from the work with patterns, which operate very similarly to dodeca­phony in both form and effect, to the impression of the ‘semiotic chaos’ arising when Beckett's texts are mentally articulated. The effect of ‘semantic chaos’ can be compared with the ‘cacophony’ of atonal music and Beckett’s texts, which are devoid of syntactic hierarchy, with dodeca­phonic pieces abounding in accidentals.

Alexander Galich, a prominent singer-songwriter, built a gallery of socio-psychological types, central to which was the image of the ordinary Soviet per­son. This article focuses on the motif of death/immortality as a plot component describing the fate of a small person in Galich’s poetry. The place of the ordi­nary person in Galich’s creative ‘characterology’ is identified. The ground­work for a classification of the ordinary person types is laid and key motifs of plots introducing the types are described. The Soviet small person is consid­ered in the structural context of Galich’s fictional world in view of his ontolo­gy, anthropology, and creative philosophy.

The short stories from Neil Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors are considered in the context of the cultural tradition of under­standing the sym­bolism of the mirror. The article aims to determine the main functions of the mirror in Gaiman's texts and describe the system of parallel images associated with the mirror and the reflection. The study concludes that the image of the mirror runs through the collection of stories, whereas its symbolism ranges from an object used in creating illusions to a magical artefact helping to see the truth. The images that accompany the mirror are linked to the motifs of silver and silverware.

Nikolai Kononov first published his story ‘Ceylon Island’ under the pen-name Alexander Chekhov (the name of Anton Chekov’s brother). This article explores the author’s literary mystification strategy as an element central to the poetic nature of ‘Ceylon Island’, its intertextuality, and its stylistic ‘set­tings’. The receptive nature of the text of Kononov’s story and the logic behind the creation of the author’s mask are considered. The structural sources of the text are revealed to be Chekhov’s Notebooks, Diaries, and Sakhalin Island.

Since the 1990s, especially after Russia joined the Bologna Process in 2003, Russian education has been adopting the key features of the US educa­tional system, having acknowledged its greater efficiency in comparison to the Soviet one. Russian reformers, however, often overlook the substantial socio-cultural differences between the two countries. To understand whether it is prudent to adopt and copy in Russia either selected features of the US educa­tional system or its goals and objectives, it is necessary to analyse the litera­ture, to identify the key characteristics of the US educational system, and to track their evolution in the US pedagogical culture. This article examines a major tradition in the US education system — market-like behaviour. An at­tempt is made to analyse the historical background of traditions in US educa­tion and its market orientation. The study considers the critique of the latter feature by specialists in American education. It is concluded that, whereas the treatment of education as business and the commercialisation of education are historically inherent in US culture, copying and adopting these practices in Russia may cause irreversi­ble damage.

This article explores the enhancement of financial literacy in non-economics students. Current national and international practices of distance learning focusing on financial literacy are analysed. The study proposes an innovative approach to teaching the Money and Money Management gami­fied distance-learning course to non-economics students. The results of course development and implementation at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal Uni­versity are described.