2022 Issue №1

The article provides a comparative and collation analysis of the linguistic specificity of election speeches of J. Biden and D. Trump in 2020. Particular attention is paid to the linguistic means of agonality functioning in the texts. This study views agonality as a type of communication of the opposing parties when trying to achieve superiority in a political contest.

The results of the study show that the means of agonality used in the election speeches of the presidential candidates contribute to the decrease of the opponent’s authority, as a result of the use of appropriate strategies and inherent tactics relevant within the political discourse semantics.

This article examines the typological features of the modern Russian education terminology. Currently, there is a large number of linguistic research works on educational discourse, but most of them focus on the analysis of its individual aspects, thereby leaving out the description of the terminological system of Russian education that is dynamically developing in the recent period. The purpose of this study is to build a systemic classification of the terminological vocabulary of modern education, which includes terminological units of different types. The research relies on modeling techniques, as well as descriptive and contextual analyses. The paper shows that the terminological units in the studied terminological system are heterogeneous and differ in the level of terminology (actually terms, pre-terms, terminoids, nomens, professionalisms and professional jargon), formal structure (individual lexemes and phrases), chronological status (outdated, modern and new term units), part-of-speech attribution (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs), semantic features (mono-lexeme and poly-lexeme units), the level of motivation (fully / partially motivated and unmotivated terms) and mastery (mastered and undeveloped signs) in the system of the Russian language. It was noticed that the terminology of Russian education in the modern era is actively replenished with terms from the areas not previously associated with the studied thematic area (computer, economic, scientific and technical, medical, etc.). Analysis of the latest special lexicographic sources revealed that some new terms of education can receive ambiguous interpretations in dictionary entries, demonstrating the incompleteness of the process of forming the subsystem in question. The author comes to some certain conclusion about the conditionality of the terminological system of modern Russian education by the specifics of the subject-thematic area, the rapid pace of its development, as well as the openness of its borders to elements of other terminological systems.

The article considers linguistic means of expressing certainty and uncertainty in the comedy, which contribute to revealing personality traits of its main characters, namely Famusov and Chatskii. Using a comparative functional-semantic analysis the authors determine the adequacy of Russian and English means of expressing the modal meanings of certainty and uncertainty in the target text. The authors conclude that all dominant constituents of the meanings mentioned above are conveyed adequately enough, except for those which are completely different due to specific features of each language. The research materials can be used in Literary Translation classes.

The article considers the functional features of the subordinating conjunction “потому что (because)” in modern Russian in the reference to the nature of its structural and syntactic position in causative complex sentences. Based on the functional-semantic analysis of the use of this conjunction in the undifferentiated and dissected structural position of its constituent parts, its role in the formation of the modal organization of complex causal sentences is established, the modal-communicative potential of this conjunction is revealed, which is realized in the corresponding syntactic constructions.

The article deals with the cognitive analysis of poetic images based on the critical approach to the conceptual blending theory (G. Fauconnier, M. Turner), taking into account the findings of the biographical analysis ensuring an in-depth interpretation of the blended spaces. The study aims to show that the semantic complexity of the poetic image goes beyond the conceptual transfer between the source and target mental spaces. Examining the case of Pärnu Elegies (1981) by David Samoylov, the article demonstrates the necessity of completing the conceptual blending method by the poet’s diaries and personal correspondence data. Adhering to the interdisciplinary transfer theory (V. V. Feshchenko) the article borrows the literary studies category of hypotext (G. Genette) to perform the linguistic analysis. Combining the MIP(VU) (Metaphor Identification Procedure), the conceptual blending method and the biographical analysis, the article introduces the hypotext and biographical input spaces that participate in creating the poetic image. The article explicates the correlations between the elegies’ blended spaces and the poet’s life perception and life circumstances. The author determines that the poetic image cannot be reduced to the conceptual projection result, its conceptual space being synthesized from the physical, emotional and intellectual experience.

The article studies the mass media impact on the integration and the rooting of highly specialized vocabulary of fashionable discourse in the Russian language. Due to this goal the author analyzed the vocabulary of modern fashion magazines, in particular the linguistic borrowings of the clothing items names of the terms that have already established themselves in the world fashion discourse. A certain attention is paid to new color terms, which, as a rule, appear in French and English languages to be traced in Russian later. The study finds that the highly specialized vocabulary of the fashion sphere enters Russian language primarily due to the printed editions, then it settles in the conversational speech to be back to their pages in a new perfected form. This process contributes to the consolidation and the widespread usage of the fashion industry vocabulary in modern Russian. The frequency of certain lexemes used in speech gets influenced by the popularity of objects or phenomena named by them, as well as by the trend for the words themselves.