Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание @jvolsu-linguistics
Статьи журнала - Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание
Все статьи: 1619
Статья научная
The article presents major ways of implementing linguistic politeness in electronic communication of the German linguocultural community. Following basic communicative principles of positive politeness, the authors analyze such e-mails speech acts as greeting, appeal, parting, congratulations, wishes, gratitude, that actualize strategies of positive politeness, or strategies of reconciliation in the virtual interaction of communicants. In German linguoculture the communicative strategies of reconciliation are the attention-and-care strategy, the strategy of using in-group identity markers, the strategy of exaggeration, the strategy of giving communicative gifts, the strategy of demonstrating intense interest; their implementation is supported with various means and methods of expressiveness, including contact appeals, adjectives, pronoun viel , modal verb mögen , performative verbs of wishes and gratitude, subjunctive mood, etc. It is stated that the communicative strategies of politeness are aimed at preserving the positive face of the addressee, that is, satisfying the needs of a person to show attention, care, interest, sympathy, love towards the addressee. It should be noted that study of the principle of politeness in email writing is viewed as a priority for German linguoculture, since communication via e-mail is one of the most popular and common ways of virtual written communication both at home and in business.
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Emotional effect of teachers’ discourse in a multicultural classroom
Статья научная
The manifestation, meaning, categorization of emotions, as well as the factors that cause them, have cultural characteristics. To build successful intercultural interaction it is necessary to be aware of them. This study explores classroom discourse and emotions of international students in a multicultural classroom. Our goal is to determine what emotions the discourse of Russian teachers evokes in students from different lingua-cultures and which speech acts have an emotional perlocutionary effect. The material was obtained through a questionnaire with the participation of 70 international students (45 Chinese and 25 Algerian). We focus on emotions and emotional states of surprise, happiness, sadness and offense. Being drawn on qualitative and quantitative methods the comparative analysis showed that the behavior of Russian teachers is more likely to surprise Chinese students than Arab ones, besides Chinese students experience negative emotions and states more often than Arabs which may indicate a greater cultural distance. In relation to speech acts that evoke the emotions, we identified some similarities and differences, which are discussed through the type of culture and cultural values. The results contribute to the study of culture specific features of emotions in communication. They specify the factors that evoke emotions in students belonging to different lingua-cultures, and can contribute to the successful interaction of Russian teachers with international students in a multicultural classroom.
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Emotive pragmatics of popularisation discourse: the impact of contextualisation on reader's interest
Статья научная
The paper adheres to the pragmatic approach to emotion processes and focuses on emotion- evocative communication. Its goal is to investigate the impact of contextualisation techniques, which employed by popularisation discourse to induce readers’ interest. The research is carried out in two ways, discourse-pragmatic and experimental. First, by adopting the sociopragmatic view of emotions and using methods of discourse analysis, the paper fleshes out a model of emotion-evocative communication, outlines contextualisation techniques, and introduces text materials. Second, by representing the experimental study, the paper assesses the interest-evoking effect of contextualisation. The experimental study involved 400 undergraduate students. We employed the scaling method (7-point bipolar scales) to measure participants’ attitude to generalised and contextualised text passages. The data analysis applied the Wilcoxon test, the Kolmogorov - Smirnov test, Spearman’s correlation coefficient, the linear regression, and the explanatory factor analysis. The comparing tests reveal that contextualisation promotes reader’s interest in the popularisation text. The findings suggest that contextualisation techniques make the text content more relevant to the reader. Personal relevance - as a kind of mediator - causes interest responses . Beyond that, it was found that that reader’s expectations about text strategies to presents knowledge construct interest- evocative communication. The findings demonstrate how communicative variables combine into the model of emotion-evocative communication.
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English academic discourse in translinguistic context: corpus-based study of lexical markers
Статья научная
The paper applies the Matrix method to an investigation into translinguistic features of English academic discourse that is serving worldwide a means of cross-cultural exchange between researchers with translingual skills. Based on the corpus approach to the comparison of the two corpora that comprise samples of professional academic writing in various fields of study (Art and Humanity, Natural and Social sciences), the paper seeks to identifyboth quantitativelyand qualitatively correlations in repertoire and frequencies of recurrent linguistic expressions between the native English-language and non-native (Russian) academic discourse performers. The corpora were investigated along with the use of lexical bundles, re-occurring lexical units, which were grouped into noun-based and preposition-based phrases with post-modifier fragments, verb-based phrases with any form of verb components. The data comparison points to a code-mixing trend at the syntagmatic layer, which is a translingual fusion of English words in accord with a mixture of syntagmatic relations typical of English and Russian variations of academic discourse. It was found that non-native writing does not reveal as much lexical flexibility as native writers do and to a large extent relies on formulaic expressions, most of which are not conventional for expert native academic writing. Native Russian writers use excessively noun-based phrases with abstract nouns and underuse noun phrases without prepositions. Verb phrases with that - and to- clauses are mainly characteristic of native professional writing whereas non-native writing employs patterns with active verbs and passive constructions. It was found that non-native writing lacks quantifying phrases and hedging expressions that mitigate the proposition.
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Evaluative connotations of proper names in Russian paremiology
Статья обзорная
Based on the study of Russian proverbs and sayings, thematic groups of paremias have been established, in which proper names have evaluative connotations; methods of education and types of estimated connotations of Russian anthroponyms are revealed
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Experimental methods of exploring multimodal discourse: crossmodal alignment
Статья научная
The study advances Crossmodal Alignment Framework to explore multimodal discourse in its three formats - semiotic, communicative and perceptive - via multimodal experiment. It considers the alignment patterns obtained from two semiotic modes (text and image), transferred in two communicative modes (speech and gesture), sensed by two perception modes (visual and audial). The common research framework determines the patterns as modulated by discourse tasks. The study features the results of multimodal experiments with the participants engaged in three discourse tasks: 1) receptive, which presumes obtaining information from text and image stimuli; semiotic alignment patterns are identified indirectly via participants' gaze response; 2) productive, in which the participants communicate the information in monological format; communicative alignment patterns are identified directly via their speech and gesture; 3) receptive-productive, which presupposes the participants perceive information visually and audially; alignment patterns are identified directly via participants' gaze behavior contingent on the stimuli areas of interest and indirectly via their speech response. Data analysis allows to determine and scale the degree of crossmodal alignment to discourse tasks, which helps identify the input of each mode to solving these tasks. The research framework and obtained results contribute to further development of multimodal discourse methods.
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Exploring automated summarization: from extraction to abstraction
Статья научная
This paper provides a review of AI-powered automated summarization models, with a focus on two principal approaches: extractive and abstractive. The study aims to evaluate the capabilities of these models in generating concise yet meaningful summaries and analyze their lexical proficiency and linguistic fluidity. The compression rates are assessed using quantitative metrics such as page, word, and character counts, while language fluency is described in terms of ability to manipulate grammar and lexical patterns without compromising meaning and content. The study draws on a selection of scientific publications across various disciplines, testing the functionality and output quality of automated summarization tools such as Summate.it, WordTune, SciSummary, Scholarcy, and OpenAI ChatGPT-4. The findings reveal that the selected models employ a hybrid strategy, integrating both extractive and abstractive techniques. Summaries produced by these tools exhibited varying degrees of completeness and accuracy, with page compression rates ranging from 50 to 95%, and character count reductions reaching up to 98%. Qualitative evaluation indicated that while the models generally captured the main ideas of the source texts, some summaries suffered from oversimplification or misplaced emphasis. Despite these limitations, automated summarization models exhibit significant potential as effective tools for both text compression and content generation, highlighting the need for continued research, particularly from the perspective of linguistic analysis. Summaries generated by AI models offer new opportunities for analyzing machine-generated language and provide valuable data for studying how algorithms process, condense, and restructure human language.
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Статья научная
The current paper deals with metaphorical framing of the COVID-19 pandemic and public response to it in the public and media discourse. Being one of the most dramatic global challenges of the third Millennium, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred transformation in social order, economic/business relationships and dramatic growth in social anxiety and tensions, mistrust and discriminatory measures. It has inevitably found its reflection in language and related discursive practices, which rely heavily on discourse metaphors. When being systematically employed, they affect people's views of events, situations and decisions they subsequently make. The present paper focuses primarilyon the COVID-induced discourse changes that create new metaphorical framings and re-shape the familiar ones. The repertoire of elicited discourse metaphors framing the coronavirus discourse communicates the changing combating strategies referred to by the authors as globalist, nationalist and discriminatory. By drawing on specially compiled subcorpus of public and media texts, the paper reveals the conceptual and inferential structure of the concept of the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses the possible implications of activating various pandemic-related frames. The study stresses that the discursive construction of the coronavirus pandemic mirrors the dynamic nature of the pandemic itself as well as the measures to combat the insidious virus taken bynational governments, the spread of misinformation and fake news as well as the split in the society and discrimination of certain groups (vaccine deniers/anti-vaxxers). Acknowledging the prevalence of military metaphors in the pandemic-related discourse, the authors claim that metaphorical framing serves as a crucial conceptual tool to communicate the gradual transition from war on COVID-19 to war of vaccines and ultimately to war on out-groups (vaccine deniers, anti-vaxxers).
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Figurative narratives of environmental security
Статья научная
The current paper presents a comprehensive overview of numerous, frequently divergent, views of the concept of environmental security and stresses the resulting ambiguity in its interpretations across various types of discourse. This calls for the need to provide an overarching explanation of what environmental security is to be able to tackle environmental issues in the years to come. Given the complexity and the abstract nature of the term, it is the effective use of language resources that can be helpful in making sense of the environmental security and relevant mechanisms to ensure it. The paper argues that figurative language serves as a pervasive cognitive mechanism in interpreting and foregrounding the major aspects of sustainable “communication” with and about the environment. The focal point of the paper is the authors’ urge to search for an apt metaphorical narrative encompassing various aspects of environmental security as a single metaphor is hardly able to cover a myriad of interdependent relations in the course of human-nature interaction. The analysis of the recurring discursive metaphors (military, medical, care) to refer to environmental security has revealed their downsides in promoting an adequate view of the current threats and, thus, the lack of public awareness of the emergency actions to save the planet.
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Focal points on constructing news stories
Статья научная
The issues stated in the article line with the current interest to pragmatic value of news releases in modern media. The news is thought to be a verbalized focal reflection of some event that was chosen by media professionals for setting the current information agenda. Having generated the opinions on the newsworthiness the authors present a set of values that may be used for measurement of relevance and clarity of an event reflection in the news content with frequency, clarity, predictability, unexpectedness, amplitude, cultural proximity, elite nations, elite people, personification, negativity among them. The novelty of the research is that the newsworthiness is checked with the focus to lexical (thematic) representation of the news in a diachronic approach: the empirical base of the research was taken from the archives of UK national and local media sources (18-20 th cent.) and implied comparison of lexical means that reflected an event itself and some values of human interest potential in the news stories written in defined periods. The article states the trend for dynamics in the way the event is reflected in the news stories - the information core of the story is merged with detailed reporting parts, and their content is conditioned by social and moral values.
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Gender identification of the British news text
Статья научная
The article is devoted to studying the impact of gender on speech behavior in mass media discourse. Gender peculiarities of English news text-formation are examined through coordination of various language means that belong to different levels of the language system with predetermined socio-cultural factors and psychological peculiarities attributed to man as a representative of masculine subculture, a communicative leader, characterized by autonomous thinking, logic, rationality, objectivity, lingua-creativity, reduced emotionality, and woman as a representative of feminine subculture, characterized by a greater degree of emotionality, empathy, cooperativeness. A number of gender parameters is listed, including content and structural features, specification / generalization of information, stylistically neutral / marked vocabulary etc. These parameters are being viewed as related with the categories of informativeness and expressiveness. It is determined that the features of the news text on the structural level manifest themselves in the selection of aspects of the events described, the organization of informative blocks. On the stylistic level gender specificity is expressed by linguistic realization of emotionality, evaluation, imagery. Gender parameters of the news text determine masculine and feminine styles of news text-formation and are included in the developed matrix of gender identification of the author of the news text. The psycholinguistic experiment allowed to verify the validity of gender parameters of the news text and to establish that the degree of sensitivity to its gender characteristics is determined by socio-cultural differences of native and non-native speakers of English.
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Habeo-картина мира в "Русской правде"
Статья научная
В статье рассматриваются посессивные отношения, отраженные в тексте «Русской Правды». Дается представление о прототипических посессивных отношениях, включающих субъекта-посессора, объект обладания и второго участника ситуации. Охарактеризованы посессивные ситуации приобщения, отчуждения и наследования объекта, преобладающие в «Русской Правде». В анализируемом тексте отмечена особая востребованность для передачи отношений собственности ряда глаголов, восходящих к одному корню, отражающему восприятие мира с позиций Habeo: изымати, емати, поимети, пояти, прияти, имати и др. Обоснована тесная связь категории посессивности с понятиями локативности и экзистенциальности, которая во многом определила наличие различных языковых средств для экспликации посессивных отношений: иметь-конструкций и быть-конструкций. С привлечением этимологических данных показана специфика выражения данными конструкциями отношений посессии, делается вывод о связи глагола иметь с «начальной точкой» владения, имения чего-то в своей сфере (брать, хватать), в отличие от глагола быть, который выражает прежде всего экзистенцию, состояние и становление этого состояния, но не посессию и ее начало. Утверждается, что в «Русской Правде», в отличие от современного русского языка, находит отражение восприятие мира с позиций Habeo: активное, динамичное, деятельностное владение одушевленным, неодушевленным объектом в рамках отношений собственности.
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Статья научная
The study was carried out with the focus on the current issues of sociolinguistics related to the search for ways to preserve the languages of small peoples. The article systematizes data on the state of the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation living in the North, Siberia and the Far East, presented in modern publications of historians and linguists, and the documents that reflect the results of the 2010 population census of the Russian Federation, considers the influence of sociolinguistic factors on the language situation in these territories. Having analyzed the world experience of legal language legislation on preserving the cultures and languages of small peoples, the authors attempted to apply some global criteria to the Russian legislation and socio-economic practice and identified socially significant criteria for establishing the language situation in relation to the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation living in the North, Siberia and the Far East: the total number of speakers of the language, the use of the language in the education system, the availability of educational and methodological materials for teaching, the factor of inter-generational transmission of a language, the attitudes to the functional benefits from practicing the language among its native speakers. By compiling a methodology for categorizing the language survival type five prototypes of the language state were identified on the basis of statistical data: safe; relatively safe; endangered; critically endangered; close to extinction or dead languages. The authors offered a set of extralinguistic criteria for obtaining objective data on the state of the language and made a supposition that despite the evidence that the languages of the indigenous small-numbered northern peoples of the Russian Federation, with rare exceptions, are on the verge of extinction, significant efforts are being made by the government of the country and the indigenous northern peoples themselves to preserve these languages.
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Статья научная
The present research investigated textual representations of writer-reader interaction in academic writing. The focus of the study was on the use of metadiscourse markers, i.e., stance and engagement markers, in applied linguistics research articles (RAs) published in English and Persian, the former written by Persian and English-speaking researchers, and the latter by Persian-speaking researchers. A cross-cultural analysis of RAs revealed similarities and differences in how academic writers express their stance and interact with their readers. Among the stance markers, hedging devices were found to be more frequently used in English RAs for expressing the authors’ position, regardless of their native language. Persian RAs, on the other hand, predominantlyused attitude markers for that purpose. In terms of the engagement markers, directives were the most prominent linguistic features employed by the writers in their native language. However, theywere significantly less frequent in English RAs written by Iranian scholars. Compared to native English writers, Iranian writers showed a slightly stronger tendency to use reader pronouns and personal asides in their native language. This study reinforces the impact of the writers’ linguistic and contextual awareness of the first- and second-language academic discourse conventions on the establishment of a successful writer-reader interaction and effective communication of arguments in academic writing.
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Interpreting metaphorical language: a challenge to artificial intelligence
Статья научная
In recent years, numerous studies have pointed to the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate and analyze expressions of natural language. However, the question of whether AI is capable of actually interpreting human language, rather than imitating its understanding, remains open. Metaphors, being an integral part of human language, as both a common figure of speech and the predominant cognitive mechanism of human reasoning, pose a considerable challenge to AI systems. Based on an overview of the existing studies findings in computational linguistics and related fields, the paper identifies a number of problems associated with the interpretation of non-literal expressions of language by large language models (LLM). It reveals that there is still no clear understanding of the methods for training language models to automatically recognize and interpret metaphors that would bring it closer to the level of human “interpretive competencies”. The purpose of the study is to identify possible reasons that hinder the understanding of figurative language by artificial systems and to outline possible directions for solving this problem. The study suggests that the main barriers to AI’s human-like interpretation of figurative natural language are the absence of a physical body, the inability to reason by analogy and make inferences based on common sense, the latter being both the result and the cognitive process in extracting and processing information. The author concludes that further improvement of the AI systems creative skills should be at the top of the research agenda in the coming years.
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Is translation a means of cross-cultural communication?
Статья научная
The paper disputes the concept of “translation as cross-cultural communication”. Anthropological turn in Translation Studies resulted in the emergence of the communicative-functional approach to translation which dictates the need to reconsider this most popular concept. Examples of translation events are considered from the perspective of this approach to prove that the actors (source text sender, target text recipient and translator) rarely communicate directly or indirectly. The only objective reality accessible to them is the texts in two languages; these texts serve as instruments of substantive activity performed by each of the actors. In many cases the purpose of translation differs from the purpose of the Source Text (ST) Sender, which makes communication between the ST Sender and the Target Text (TT) Recipient impossible. The translator’s principal task is to create a text in the target language that would be useful for the TT Recipients activity. The principal purpose of the TT Recipient is to receive information which could be used successfully in his or her substantive activity. Actors in a translation event deal only with texts, not with each other (except in situations of oral communication in which interpretation is performed). Thus, “translation as cross-cultural communication” is a metaphor used to substitute the wish for the reality. The concept does not fit the mere definition of communication seen as giving information or exchange of information.
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Legal media discourse as a hybrid phenomenon
Статья научная
The paper describes legal media discourse, which is a hybrid discourse formation whose preconstructs are legal discourse and media discourse. The study was conducted using general scientific methods: induction, generalization, analysis, synthesis, description; and specialized linguistic methods: continuous sampling method, discourse analysis. The texts of legal media discourse presented on the official websites of the English-language media platforms such as The Guardian, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, Washington Monthly, etc. form the empirical basis of the study. Legal discourse and media discourse are institutional discourses whose interaction results in forming an independent hybrid. The article provides the analysis of legal media discourse using the pattern of the institutional discourse description proposed by V.I. Karasik, which consists of the following criteria: typical participants, chronotope, goals, values, strategies, genres, precedent texts, and discursive formulas. The characteristics of the discursive hybrid under study are determined by referring to the preconstruct discourses features identified at the present time. The description of legal media discourse as a specific sphere of the intersection of law and media is viewed as not a mechanical sum of the characteristics of legal discourse and media discourse, but their synthesis which accounts for the independent nature of the hybrid discursive formation.
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