2025 Issue №1

The purpose of this article is to define the concept of situational-discursive demonstrativeness and identify the linguistic means of its expression and functions. An interdisciplinary approach and the method of psycholinguistic analysis of communicants’ statements were employed in the study. The material for analyzing the properties of situational-discursive demonstrativeness included the speech production of participants in television interviews, characters from feature films, and social media bloggers on TikTok and YouTube between 2005 and 2023. It was found that situational-discursive demonstrativeness is a communicative tonality characterized by the speaker’s self-presentation, exaggeration of their significant qualities, and emphasis on dominant emotions, expressed through semiotic multimodality, which varies depending on the type of activity and the situational requirements of communication. In both personal and institutional discourses, communicative demonstrativeness is realized through a stable set of lexical and phraseological means, including hyperbole, hyperbolic tropes and clichés, emphasis, antithesis, lexical repetition, expressive verbal metaphors, pronouns with a generalizing meaning (e. g., “everyone”), intensifying adverbs, inversion, exclamatory sentences, rhetorical questions, syntactic parallelism, positive constatives, demonstration of material attributes of success, and speech strategies of boasting and exaggeration. In different communicative situations, demonstrative tonality serves influencing, regulatory, evaluative, presentational, constative, communicative, and emotive functions. The findings can be applied in the fields of semiotics and psycholinguistics.

The relevance of this research topic is determined by the growing interest of linguists in studying the means of verbalizing speech aggression in the discourse of politicians and political commentators. This interest is reflected in the analysis of the repertoire of speech strategies employed, implemented through specific tactics and represented by particular speech moves and linguistic means. The study analyzes the speech move “indirect insult,” which actualizes the tactic of insult within the speech-behavioral strategy of discrediting the President Biden administration, aiming to identify the linguistic means of expressing this speech move. Three groups of lexical means (non-normative, colloquial lexical units, and lexical units with negative connotations) and three groups of stylistic devices (means of imagery creation, descriptive and attributive means, and expressive syntactic devices) were identified, along with a set of characteristic grammatical constructions that objectify the speech move “indirect insult.” It was established that lexical units of high, medium, and low degrees of invectiveness, according to the scale of invective lexicon developed by A. N. Pachina and I. V. Pekarskaya, determine the occurrence of an indirect insult, while grammatical constructions and expressive syntactic means serve as auxiliary elements in manifesting this speech move.

The article examines the use of linguistic manipulation techniques by Joe Biden and Donald Trump during the political debates of the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign. The strategy of manipulative influence on the mass audience through presenting information in a manner advantageous to the speaker is understood as one of the key strategies of agonistic discourse, which implies a competitive nature of communication. Five linguistic tactics used to implement this strategy are identified and analyzed, namely evasion of an answer, question substitution, speculation, generalization, and clarification. The persuasive potential of relevant linguistic units functioning as explicit markers of the identified speech tactics is interpreted. The universal nature of the strategy of information manipulation within the context of presidential campaign discourse is noted.

This research is devoted to the study of efficacious translation strategies in the process of game localization. It discusses the means of linguistic localization of videogames in terms of cultural linguistic approach. The attention is paid to the analysis of the methods and grounds for choosing certain translation strategies so as to adapt the in-game realia fand terms for the target gaming community. The research is based on the materials of the role-playing computer game (RPG) Disco Elysium and its official Russian translation. The game glossary drawn up in the process of the study and the subsequent comparison of the lexical units enables to identify the main peculiarities of translation solutions. The analysis of the empirical material has shown that in the linguistic localization of a game product domestication, foreignization, compensation, direct translation and transcreation are used as the main strategies of linguistic and cultural adaptation. The article explores optimal and effective strategies for video game localization within a linguocultural framework. Methods of linguistic localization for in-game realities of computer video games and the rationale for choosing translation strategies to adapt the game product for the target audience are analyzed. The study is based on the material of the English-language role-playing game (RPG) Disco Elysium and its official Russian version. A glossary of translation equivalents compiled during the study and the subsequent comparison of lexical units in the original and localized versions revealed the main features of translation decisions. The analysis of empirical material demonstrated that linguistic localization for the linguistic localization of the game product employs strategies such as domestication, foreignization, compensation, direct translation, and transcreation.

The article examines the features of verbalizing the category of quality in Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose texts through the lens of the vectors of figurative semantics formation by means of epithet complexes. The purpose of the study is to identify the mechanisms of representing qualitative, attributive semantics in Marina Tsvetaeva’s idiolect. To achieve this goal, the following methods were employed: descriptive, component analysis, and cognitive-semantic analysis of linguistic units. Epithet complexes of metaphorical, metonymic, and metaphonymic types were analyzed, allowing the identification of the author’s logic in forming linguistic units with attributive semantics. The research material included Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose texts, which are among the least studied and contain the author’s comments on the writing process. The study established that the mechanism of forming epithet complexes in Tsvetaeva’s prose is metaphonymy, with metaphonymic epithet complexes representing hybrid epithet structures that reflect a complex logic of attributive meaning formation. It is shown that the concept of quality serves as a central poetic dominant in the poet’s idiolect, verbalized through non-systemic epithet structures in the language, the modeling of which is one of the tasks of her poetic universe; the epithet is understood not as a device but as the precise word. The analysis revealed the types of metaphonymic epithet complexes in Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose.