Vol 23, No 3 (2019)

Vološinov ([1929]1973) is one of the most frequently cited works in studies on reported speech, but its interpretation varies considerably between authors. Within the linguistic anthropological tradition, its central message is often conflated with Erving Goffman’s ‘speaker roles’, and in a recent publication, Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018) marry ideas they attribute to Vološinov (1973) and Mikhail M. Bakhtin to those by the formal semanticist Donald Davidson. Responding to Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018) (and a shorter version of a similar argument in Goddard and Wierzbicka (2019), this paper seeks to explore the philosophical foundations of reported speech research, particularly in relation to Vološinov/Bakhtin. It suggests that reported speech research is motivated by two fundamentally distinct goals, one here labelled ‘Fregean’ and the other ‘Bakhtinian’. Questions and methods used in both of these research traditions lead to two radically different understandings of reported speech. This affects the applicability of the definition of direct/indirect speech Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018) propose. It also motivates an alternative approach to reported speech advocated by the current author and others that is criticised by Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018). The article further seeks to rehabilitate the analysis of Wierzbicka (1974), which Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018) partially reject. Whereas Wierzbicka (1974) treats direct and indirect speech as constructions of English, Goddard and Wierzbicka (2018) elevate the opposition to a universal, which belies the cultural sensitivity to semantic variation the authors display in other work. The paper concludes with a brief note about the semantic status of ‘say’ in Australian languages and states that the relevance of Vološinov ([1929]1973) is undiminished, also in the light of recent developments in language description. It remains a highly original study whose implications are yet to fully impact research on reported speech.

This paper critiques the idea that a fool and their money are soon parted by using multimodal analysis to explore one of the ways in which people are parted from money: credit cards. I analyse the homepages of two products, the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ as rated by UK consumer organisation Which? In order to understand the range of communication used in these websites, I employ a multimodal analysis of their language, choice of colour, typeface, layout and images (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; van Leeuwen 2005, 2011). Together, these show that the individual is constructed in different ways by the two products. For the card rated best, the viewer is constructed as a trustworthy consumer who is rewarded for this with further opportunities for consumption. For the card rated as worst, the viewer is positioned as a failed, but redeemable, consumer. The different constructions of the consumer also suggest that ‘credit’ is desirable but ‘debt’ is not. Taking into account the moral complexity of debt, I suggest that the lexical item credit card would be better changed to debt token . I argue that the real foolishness is the system itself, the one that credit cards (‘debt tokens’) index and exemplify. Taking the two sites together, I show that consumption is constructed as both desirable and risky. As credit cards construct the individual as an (isolated) person with few rights and great responsibility (Henry 2010), I suggest that these sites index the central role of the individual as a consumer. A good citizen is parted from their money.

In the 21st century, even local tourist spots are globally accessible and need to be communicated in a globally shared language, a lingua franca (Ben-Rafael & Ben Rafael 2015). The language of most obvious choice among speakers from different linguacultural backgrounds is English. When translating notices in national parks into English, translators should predominantly consider the function of the TT (target text), the target audience (not exclusively L1 speakers of English but, the speakers of a variety of languacultures communicating in English as lingua franca (ELF) and opt for translation solutions that would account for visitors representing a diversity of languacultures. The present paper aims at finding out what modifications in translation of visitors’ rules may be necessary if the target readership is to be considered, and at explicating the translation process through applying a transdisciplinary perspective of ELF studies, linguistic landscape (LL) studies, cross-field studies on conceptualization, translanguaging and translation studies. The study shows that these modifications affect the significance and hierarchy of the four principles operating in LL (presentation-of-self, power-relations, good reasons and collective-identity) and are projected into specific LL-tailored translation solutions (shifts in modality, lexis, style and discourse markers). The modifications are achievable in ELF, which, as a form and function, a de-regionalized and de-culturalized artifact of global village, is capable of catering for a variety of languacultures with their specific societal conventions, practices, and the whole explicit and implicit axio-sphere.

The object of the article is word semantics and its realization in the immediate context. The goal and the innovative component of the study is the analysis of the problem in the light of cognitive linguistics. We proceed from the assumption that the lexical meaning of a word contains a component responsible for its entry into the text. This component involves searching for lexical partners of the word in the syntagmatic chain. The semes participating in this process are actualized - they must get into the bright field of con-sciousness. The classical manifestation of this connection is the soalled semantic agreement ( собака лает ‘a dog barks’, бурый медведь ‘a brown bear’, волосы дыбом ‘hair (stands) on end’, etc.). We use examples from Russian literature to demonstrate that when a non-typical (non-standard) word combination is formed, the concepts get intersected (mixed). The examples, such as самопишущий костюм ‘a self-writing suit’ or жаркая робость ‘hot timidity’, expand a person’s cognitive horizons making the individual accustomed to a different (virtual) reality. The background and guarantor of this combinatorial process is the so-called “common sense” based on the native speaker’s previous experience. The result of the study is the presentation of five special situations manifesting the relationship between the word and its text partners: polysemantic words, phraseological units, introduced (embedded) meanings, additional connotations and a surprise effect. The author provides examples of the pressure (influence) of text memory on the speaker when selecting a necessary word and considers the idea of the predicative nature of the compatibility of lexemes. The article justifies the emergence of compositional semantics as a special direction in modern linguistics and demonstrates some of its results (based on the Russian language).

Associative experiments uncover people’s active attitude to the world represented by language means that determines their relevant strategies of verbal activity and mediates the specifics of their world conceptualization. A word’s associative field modeled on the basis of experimental data is a psychological structure of a word’s content that is relevant for native speakers. Associative meaning distinguished via the analysis of distribution of reactions to a stimulus word proves to be an effective method of discovering emerging trends in the change of word meanings. The author researches the issue of data interpretation in associative experiments. Despite the long history of usage, the notion “associative field” and the correlation of stimulus and reaction are often interpreted in different ways because, firstly, they model the most complex processes of speech activity; secondly, most of suggested typologies of associates do not have a common systematization criterion, which hinders the usage of such classifications in research practice and sometimes leads to an ambiguous interpretation of associative data. Therefore, the author argues that classifications of associates should be developed depending on: (1) characteristics of psycholinguistic/linguistic object researched through an associative experiment; (2) isomorphism of speech and the activity it accompanies; (3) characteristics of mental supports in the cognitive process; (4) the way of representation of these supports. Such criteria of classification require an analysis of the correlation between stimulus and reaction as a unit of association. This correlation is a separate speech act where the stimulus is a motive producing the reaction and the associate expresses the author’s communicative intention. This helps to establish motives of associating and thus acquire a more veracious database for modelling different components of speech activity and its overall production/ comprehension processes. Besides, this approach justifies the principles of worldview modelling. The author presents theoretical and methodological grounds for an effective analysis of associates on the basis of a psycholinguistic object defined by several parameters: strategy of association, dominant psychological function of a language sign that realizes the strategy and the motive of activity explicated in associates.

The concept of mediatization in modern social sciences leads to a new understanding of the role of media in society and culture. Within the framework of this concept, media appears not as an intermediary between society, its culture and socially significant information, but as a structural element of society and culture itself (T. Adorno, M. Castells, N. Couldry, S. Hjarvard, F. Krotz, S. Livingstone, W. Lippmann, N. Luhmann, 1. McLuhan, P. Lazarsfeld, R. Merton, K. Popper, S. Zizek). The relevance of our study is due to the urgent need to investigate the effects of mediatization associated with its increasingly global nature. We hypothesise that in the process of mediatization of culture in the space of any national media discourse a new type of culture is created - media culture. The aim of this study is to show the formation of media culture on the example of the Russian language media discourse in Kazakhstan. The research is based on the linguistic concept of precedence (Yu.N. Karaulov, V.G. Kostomarov, D.B. Gudkov, V.V. Krasnykh) and the modern understanding of the typology of culture in Russian philosophy (N.B. Kirillova, V.V. Mironov and etc.). The study pursues the following goals: to identify precedent phenomena, which we define as minimized texts of culture, in the headers of the most widely circulated Russian language publications in Kazakhstan; to analyse precedent onyms associated with the classical (elitist) or mass culture; to consider phraseological units as markers of popular culture. On the basis of the analysis of precedents and phraseological units used in the dominant positions of the Russian language media discourse in Kazakhstan, we conclude that media culture is formed in the process of mediatization of elite, mass and folk culture through precedents and phraseological units. Media culture is a special, integral type of modern culture that combines elements of all types of cultures (elite, mass and folk) and is replicated through mass media in society. It consolidates society on the basis of general media knowledge.

The World Englishes Paradigm studies various aspects of the English language characterized by specific peculiarities and changing as a result of contacts with indigenous languages and cultures. The history of English in Nigeria embraces 500 years of an interaction between highly different cultural systems and civilizations. Language contacts between English and the indigenous languages of Nigeria have led to its linguistic, cultural and intrastructural diversity. The aim of this article is to analyse the gastronomic vocabulary of Nigerian English influenced by the Nigerian worldview and culture. The research is focused on borrowings from African languages (mainly Yoruba and Igbo) that play a vital role in forming the culturally important lexicon of Nigerian English. The sources of the research material are dictionaries, as well as books by Nigerian writers composed in English. The analysis carried out in the course of the research allowed us to discover secondary nominations that denote Nigerian flora and cuisine, to reveal their metaphorical usage and to study corresponding figurative comparisons, idioms, proverbs and sayings. The investigation of gastronomic symbols in Nigerian speech shows universal processes of employing common gastronomic lexical units from real-life discourse as a basis for symbolization. The results of the study show that the gastronomic vocabulary and the images it creates constitute one of the most impressive Nigerian cultural codes. The knowledge of this vocabulary is instrumental in understanding those codes.