Статьи журнала - Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание
Все статьи: 1555
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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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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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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Статья научная
This article presents the experiential data on the dominant thematic characteristics of texts concerning fashion by English speaking columnists Hamish Bowles and Suzy Menkes, obtained with the aid of semantic and statistical analysis (the AntConc concordancer developed by Dr. Laurence Anthony from Waseda University Japan). The fragments of the texts have been examined from the perspective of functional and semantic representations of nominativeness, process, and attributiveness as the basic mental and linguistic categories. Among the dominant thematic units of the nominativeness are: “fashion” (22 %), “person” (20 %), “art and science” (10 %), “time” (4,5 %), “buildings” (4 %), “space and movement” (3 %), “inter-object relations” (3 %), and “plants and animals” (2 %). The category of process comprises the thematic categories of “movement and transfer” (23 %), “creation and modification” (19 %), “mental processes” (18 %) and “cooperation” (6 %), “speech” (5 %), “possession” (5 %) and “similarity” (4 %). The category of attributiveness is represented by adjectives that belong to thematic categories of “evaluation” (40 %), “color and shades” (13 %), “toponymical features” (10 %), “temporal features” (8 %), “size” (6 %), “materials and fabrics” (4 %), “shape” (3 %), “similarity / difference” (2 %) and “restriction” (2 %); by adverbs, which are frequented by circumstantial adverbs, realizing the meaning as suggested by “where”, “when”, and “how” (39 %), degree adverbs, fulfilling the semantic function of comparison (28 %), connective adverbs, responsible for the logical connection between lexical units (17 %), focusing adverbs that implement the function of restriction (9 %), and stance adverbs that reflect the author’s position in a text (7 %). The data may be used to objectify the lexical and thematic features of the thematic space or serve as reference material for conceptual studies of an author’s style.
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Lingual semiotics of absolute power in the Tudors’ times
Статья научная
The paper addresses the phenomenon of absolute power enablement in Great Britain of the 15th-16th centuries from the perspective of social semiotics and semantics: it includes the definition of obligatory and optional parameters of power and identification of its lingual-semiotic, ethno-cultural and semantic features. The Anglo-Saxon absolute power generates a lingual semiotic space that is structured with a system of verbal and non-verbal signs of various complexity and content; they perform their iconic, directive, evaluative and presentation functions to exercise maximum authoritative impact. Special attention is paid to royal rituals as the power is enabled through them. The case study reveals semiotic, ritual and nominative means of power representation in times of the royal dynasty of the Tudors (1485-1603), a period reputed as England’s “Golden Age”. The semantic space of Anglo-Saxon absolute power is composed from lexical units that nominate subjects, objects, tools and resources of royal power (economic, social, political), as well as its authority actions, conditions and processes that depict the stages of «birth, life and death” of power in general and formation, distribution and enactment of power in England of the Anglo-Saxon era, represented by the specific conceptual and lingua-cultural sphere by means of non-verbal (material) and verbal signs.
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Linguistic features of NATO's media image (the case study of British online publications)
Статья научная
The paper investigates linguistic specific means of NATO's image making in online British leading newspapers. The case study involves news reports and analytical articles that represent explicit and implicit evaluation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The investigation is based on the principles of the media linguistic approach and suggests the structural peculiarities of a media image that can be analyzed as a three-sided unit including positive, negative and neutral structural elements of image introduction into a media text. The NATO's image can be viewed as that of a geopolitical actor, creating its Natoland. Certain media topics are analyzed as creating positive and negative images of the NATO as a military organization. A finite list of positive and negative constituents to the Alliance's image is presented in the paper. It is assumed that the simplistic writer-reader model of interaction shapes certain elements of a media image that can be interpreted by a reader. The author distinguishes in the paper the principle constituents of an international organization in general, and the NATO in particular. Findings of the study demonstrate that the NATO's media image is interpreted by the readers as the conceptual entity of two key images: a peacemaker and a hawk that are restored on lexical and intertextual levels
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Linguistic pragmatics of english language restaurant online discourse
Статья научная
The paper presents an analysis of linguistic pragmatics of restaurant online discourse that is plunged into studying the content of English versions of British restaurant websites. The authors state that the investigated segment of virtual restaurant communication is organized on the basis of a linguistic-and-pragmatic model, which is constructed from the following components: discourse goal, discourse addresser's intention / communicative-pragmatic purposes with corresponding strategies and tactics. Special attention is paid to the main communication strategies of the discourse under analysis, among which there are the strategies of creating positive emotional mood, constructing an attractive image of the restaurant, increasing the activity of restaurant guests. It is established that these strategies are implemented by a set of tactics. The authors distinguish and describe verbal (lexical, lexical-grammatical and stylistic features), as well as non-verbal means that are used bysite moderators for implementing the desired tactics. It is stated that the most frequent linguistic means are lexical units with emotional-expressive and attitudinal meanings, metaphorical and pleonastic constructions, modal verbs, superlatives; interrogative-responsive and imperative structures; non-verbal means of communication are represented by graphics, font and colour highlighting, various illustrations and photographs. The suggested linguistic and pragmatic model uncovers the following restaurant online discourse regularities: location of zones with verbal or non-verbal dominating means is defined by visual assessment factors of information representation on the website.
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Статья научная
The article deals with the discursive construction of artificial intelligence (AI) in the English-language media discourse. Corpus methods establish semantic, figurative-perceptual and axiological specificity in the media representation of AI in various media segments, such as tabloids and broadsheet papers. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis includes: 1) identification of unique semantic domains that determine discourse interpretations of this socially significant phenomenon, followed by an analysis of their dispersion in narratives about AI; 2) analysis of the figurative-evaluative and value content of its media representation; 3) investigation of the specifics of broadsheet media and tabloid media representations of the AI concept. It was found that AI receives multiple media representations, in which its conceptual features represented by the lexical items of the semantic fields “Knowledge”, “Ability”, “Information and Computer Technologies” are supplemented and enriched by the lexical units of the semantic fields “Safety/Danger”, “Transformation”, “Ethics”. In media narratives about AI, the concept of “imitation of human abilities” is often associated with fake news, plagiarism, warfare, crime, climate change, and unemployment. Corpus data revealed that in the narratives about AI in broadsheet media, the lexical items of the semantic field “Robots” emphasize the similarity of AI with anthropomorphic entities; the semantic field “Competition” represents the idea of a rivalry between a human and a machine, as well as between countries, governments and companies; the semantic field “Warfare” actualizes the pragmatics of warning related to collective security and expressing public concern about the possible negative consequences of the development of AI. Popular media emphasize the androgenic nature of AI, its entertainment potential (“Games”), practical values related to health care (“Medicines and Treatment”); and the pragmatics of warning related to individual safety (“Crime”). The evaluative media representation of AI is formed mainly by ethical and practical, often negative, evaluative features transmitted through metaphoric images, intertextual references, and cultural models that determine the behavioural patterns of the discursive community members.
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Localization and internationalization of texts of the media discourse
Статья научная
The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the original and secondary texts of media discourse aimed at identifying the ways to localize and internationalize the verbal content of news websites. The study has been conducted on the material of news hypertexts in four languages - Russian, English, German and French, posted on the international Internet resource rt.com , Business Insider news portal, National Review newspaper, RTD Documentary Channel , L’Express journal. The authors substantiate the importance of using the terms ‘ localization ’ and ‘ internationalization ’ in translation studies to name inter-language transformations used in creating news messages, and analyze the definitions of these concepts in the frameworks of linguistics. The analysis shows that in many cases the standard translation model “source text translation text”, which presupposes a certain level of semantic equivalence, loses its relevance, since the secondary text is a new verbal product. It has been shown that the localized verbal space of the analyzed international media websites is created through the use of the following translation techniques: addition / omission of information in accordance with the pragmatic characteristics of readers, inclusion of culture-specific vocabulary in the secondary text, explication of toponyms and proper names, neutralization of imagery, omission of precision vocabulary, indication of a personal viewpoint of a secondary text’s author, historical reference to allusions. It has also been revealed that internationalization of texts is performed through omission of cultural markers, addition of phrases emphasizing the view on the country “from outside”, explication of toponyms, replacing proper names with generalized lexemes, as well as by indicating the positions of English-speaking countries on topical issues.
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Lost in machine translation: contextual linguistic uncertainty
Статья научная
The article considers the issues related to the semantic, grammatical, stylistic and technical difficulties currently present in machine translation and compares its four main approaches: Rule-based ( RBMT ), Corpora-based ( CBMT ), Neural ( NMT ), and Hybrid ( HMT ). It also examines some “open systems”, which allow the correction or augmentation of content by the users themselves (“crowdsourced translation”). The authors of the article, native speakers presenting different countries (Russia, Greece, Malaysia, Japan and Serbia), tested the translation quality of the most representative phrases from the English, Russian, Greek, Malay and Japanese languages by using different machine translation systems: PROMT (RBMT), Yandex.Translate (HMT) and Google Translate (NMT). The test results presented by the authors show low “comprehension level” of semantic, linguistic and pragmatic contexts of translated texts, mistranslations of rare and culture-specific words, unnecessary translation of proper names, as well as a low rate of idiomatic phrase and metaphor recognition. It is argued that the development of machine translation requires incorporation of literal, conceptual, and content- and-contextual forms of meaning processing into text translation expansion of metaphor corpora and contextological dictionaries, and implementation of different types and styles of translation, which take into account gender peculiarities, specific dialects and idiolects of users. The problem of untranslatability (‘linguistic relativity') of the concepts, unique to a particular culture, has been reviewed from the perspective of machine translation. It has also been shown, that the translation of booming Internet slang, where national languages merge with English, is almost impossible without human correction.
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