Vol 21, No 2 (2017)

There is a significant body of literature about the Roma, but comparatively little exists in which their voices can be heard. This study takes an intercultural perspective to look at the identity negotiations of four self-identifying Roma-Slovak schoolchildren between the ages of 13-14 enrolled at a state academy in Kent. Interviews focused on the role of language in constructing their identities, the perceptions of others and the nature of possible conflicts. The qualitative analyses revealed five themes: Perception of Identity by Others, Adaptability, Aspirations, Self-Perceptions of Identity, and Conflict. Participants’ identities were found to be far more dynamic than the traditional binarized view of the Roma as the ‘other’ (McGarry & Agarin 2014). There is a strong element of ascription by others in terms of the nature of participants’ ethnicity and its relationship to their identity. Both their ethnic and national identity are central in the ways in which they see themselves.

The displacement of people who leave their home to live in the streets is one of the social dramas commonly found in large urban areas. Despite forming a heterogeneous population group, these people are seen by society as one homogenous crowd, grouped together based on the generalizations of negative categorizations attributed to them. This article analyzes the displacement storytelling of a woman who lost her house to heavy rainstorms, which forced her to go live in the streets with her seven youngest children. Based on the concepts of membership categorization analysis, stigma and talking back, we aim to investigate how this former street dweller refutes the stigmatized identities that she knows are attributed to her, as well as how she claims an alternative identity. Her narrative was produced in the context of an interview for research on life stories. The results show that the storyteller seeks to build a coherent narrative for her own self by adopting a belief system to organize her life story and by providing explanations to the events in her life. Accordingly, she blames the street dwellers’ deviant behavior on the street environment, and also claims her status as a member of the “family” collection by invoking the dominant discourse on motherhood as an ideal of female fulfillment. Ultimately, this study highlights the importance of knowing the native categories, that is, the categories created by the members of the group whose actions are being studied, which challenge the categories conceived by outsiders.

The article focuses on the problem of the influence of rhetorical genres of cultivating communication. This influence varies polemical and epideictic genres. The first affect the cultivation of horizontal social relations. Second on the - on the development of vertical ones. Epideictic kind of eloquence interpreted expanded. This takes into account those new genres, which could not have known Aristotle defined the function epideictic speeches as “praise or blame”. It is about propaganda, advertising, homiletics and didactics. At the same time the controversy is associated not only with the dialogic, but also with the monological texts. This raises the question about the role of literature in the cultivation of controversy. The material is mainly the history of Russian literature and language. The conclusion is that the excessive development of some sorts of eloquence at the expense of others can be counter-productive for the culture.

This paper explores some aspects of functional stylistics with relation to discourse analysis. The basis of every stylistic research is the identification of a set of linguistic elements that determine stylistic variation in a context of speech. Without this basis, every unit of speech may be considered only optionally marked with no ground for the estimation of its relative significance or communicative value. It is argued in the paper based on the theory of ‘timbre strings’ (Konurbaev 2015) that contextual neutrality is primarily functional rather than purely stylistic in nature. Linguistic elements marked in the dictionary as stylistically marked may remain neutral in the context of stylistically comparable elements as is the case with the Bible or other context heavily fraught with inherently connotative elements. Every instance of stylistic markedness or neutrality can be determined against the broad stylistic background of the context under investigation. Intonation and timbre may serve as a good marker of stylistic hierarchy of elements in speech.

The present paper aims to provide a new methodology for contrastive analysis of basic units of intra- and intercultural communication and exemplify it using the analysis of the speech behavior pattern of promise. In contrast to the other existing terms used for a basic unit of communication behavior, such as speech act (J. Austin and J. Searle), speech genre (M. Bakhtin), the author suggests employing a new one, namely, speech behaviour pattern (SBP). The illocutionary content and general organization of SBP can be considered universal, while its realization in a language is culturally conditioned and therefore may vary significantly in different language communities. When analyzing SBP, one needs to single out and describe the following components: 1) the communicative aim of SBP or its illocution in terms of Natural Semantic Language, 2) the structure of SBP including lexical and grammatical characteristics of the major components of utterances that realize the given pattern, 3) situational-pragmatic factors that influence the realization of SBP, 4) the communicative-pragmatic field reflecting the hierarchical organization of SBP, consisting of the prototypical core and gradually formed periphery, and 5) the perlocutionary effect of SBP, i.e. description of possible reactions to utterances realizing the given pattern. Using the proposed methodology, the author provides a contrastive analysis of the SBP of promise in German and Russian. The study is based on the existing corpora of the two languages.