2014 Issue №2

The present-day stage of scientific knowledge is characterized by a shift of research aims in different scientific spheres to the cognitive aspects of linguistic phenomena. The cognitive approach to research on word-formation processes is supported by many linguists; however, still being insufficiently developed, it requires a systematization of new methodological tools. The author presents her own vision of the methodological and theoretical framework of cognitive word formation studies.

The author analyses the linguistic and pragmatic aspects of retrospective discourse which is structured by various means including culture-specific words. The author offers a systematized classification of these words depending on the effect these words produce on the reader. Special attention is paid to anthroponyms, toponyms, and temporal markers accumulating information which is important to the reader.

This article considers the interaction between the functional and semantic categories of theme and rheme forming the basis for the generation, information deployment, and functioning of discourse. It is emphasized that the communicative structure of a political text incorporates several types of the themerheme progression formed through replacing the theme with the rheme and the transformation of the latter into the theme. It is concluded that the effective communicative impact of discourse is achieved through the appropriate functional perspective planning.

This article deals with affectedness, a semantic category which underlies particular syntactic phenomena determining syntactic rules and tendencies but having no morphological markers, not unlike other covert categories. It is relevant to direct object selection in various languages, be-passives and getpassives in English, some types of impersonal sentences in Russian, etc.,which reflects general typological patterns.

The English adjective GOOD is under study in the article. Samples of its meanings found in dictionaries are compared with those from the Oxford English Corpus. As a result of the contrastive analysis, considerable changes were found. This spectrum of differences as well as combinative potential of GOOD gave occasion to rubricate this adjective as eurysemic.

The focus of this article is on the cognitive structure and means of verbalisation of the temporal and atemporal layers in Charles Dickens's depiction of Christmas in his novella «A Christmas Carol». In the complex structure of the holiday concept, past and present become intrinsically blended, Christmas time being a manifestation of eternity.

This article studies trends in the development of the German language and their manifestations in spoken language. It is established that, under the influence oral discourse conditions, the antinomies of language development are resolved in regional spoken languages predominantly in favor of the system (usage vs system), the speaker (speaker vs listener), expressivity (regularity vs expressiveness), and the code (code vs text).

This article provides a detailed definition of cultural identity – a modality and an essential component of identity and its types. To this end, the study differentiates between the notions of individual and collective cultural identities as phenomena of individual and collective consciousness. Such definitions shape the trajectories of research into identity as an interdisciplinary category within the cognitive-discursive paradigm of modern linguistics.

This article analyses the large-scale renaming campaign held by the German leadership in the late 1930s in order to Germanise the Prussian territories of the state. It is concluded that the puristic activities of German National Socialists widely discussed in the modern scientific community were inconsistent.

This article deals with the key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s literary domain theory as applied to post-1989 German literature. The major extra-literary factors that affected fictional discourse after the Unification of Germany are described. Special attention is paid to the inter-discursive nature of contemporary literary landscape.

This article deals with the balance and misbalance of the English and Russian biblical idioms as regards their stylistic colouring. The idea is put forward that the misbalance can be accounted for by the different priorities of the Western and Eastern cultural traditions.

The paper deals with some peculiarities of translating colloquial and lowcolloquial vocabulary functioning in the novels of S. Maugham into Russian. The features of translation equivalents are identified at the stylistic and semantic levels. The ways of compensating for the lost components of meaning are shown. In spite of that the colloquial and low-colloquial elements belong to typologically different languages, some similarities are observed at semantic and stylistic levels.

This article considers the discursive models of developing the synergetic potential of economic metaphors. A cluster model of metaphor synergy is built on the basis of intertextual metaphor, which creates a powerful field of conceptual tension. It is shown that the economic metaphor acts as an instrument of sense production in the interdiscursive space. A study into the intertextual metaphor helps to describe the process of sense saturation and compaction of a text through creating new sources of entropy and successive clarification of semantic ambiguity. The analysis brings to light the interaction of various vehicles of sense which cannot be deduced from systemic semantics and belong to the sphere of discursive semantics. The intricate cluster chain contains units that not only actualize the shared implicit ethno-cultural senses, but also create unpredictable trajectories of semantic development.

This paper is devoted to the influence of cognitive factors on the foreign language speech structure. Native Russian speakers tend to copy the native system of morphological and semantic-syntactic patterns in their English speech, which results in deviations from the authentic English norms. It is concluded that the foreign speech production regularities and grammatical idioethnism of the English speech of Russian speakers results from the automatic selection of semantic-syntactic means of thought verbalization.