2020 Issue №1

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.