Vol 24, No 1 (2020)

In his famous introduction to his monograph “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” Bronislaw Malinowski (1922: 24f.) points out that a “collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum , as documents of native mentality”. This is one of the prerequisites to “grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. Malinowski managed to document a “ Corpus Inscriptionum Agriculturae Quriviniensis ” in his second volume of “Coral Gardens and their Magic” (1935 Vol II: 79-342). But he himself did not manage to come up with a holistic corpus inscriptionum for the Trobriand Islanders. One of the main aims I have been pursuing in my research on the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture, and cognition has been to fill this ethnolinguistic niche. In this essay, I report what I had to do to carry out this complex and ambitious project, what forms and kinds of linguistic and cultural competence I had to acquire, and how I planned my data collection during 16 long- and short-term field trips to the Trobriand Islands between 1982 and 2012. The paper ends with a critical assessment of my Trobriand endeavor.

The article deals with the peculiarities of communicative politeness in the poorly investigated sphere of Russian-language communication focusing specifically on online groups. The purpose of the article is to identify the ways and means used in this environment for the organization of polite communication. A distinctive feature of the author’s research approach is the analysis of etiquette in the context of a dialogue, which means not only the analysis of the rules of stimulus, but also the rules of reaction, which corresponds to the systematic approach as a general principle of media linguistics (as a research method). The article defines speech etiquette as a system of norms and rules of polite speech behavior, the observance of which ensures the existence of the online community. The study allows us to conclude that the communicative tactics of etiquette in online groups are as follows: a) the participant’s inclusion into the community is regulated; b) bans on some forms of speech behavior are established and sanctions for violations of bans are imposed; c) high communicative status is provided to the author in different ways and freedom for creative self-expression is guaranteed to each participant; d) on the one hand, the establishment of contacts with a partner suitable in one or another parameter is stimulated, on the other hand, the degree of the partners’ proximity is regulated in accordance with the wish of its initiator; e) the opportunity to give/receive a response to a particular activity of the communication initiator is provided. These setups are implemented via a variety of resources, including both technical and speech means of address and response. Netiquette, drawings and images help to ensure emotional comfort. An adequate communicative distance is supported by abbreviations used in speech and understood only by the group members, by creating an adequate balance in the use of elevated and low stylistic means, in the use of methods creating a comic effect. Following speech etiquette rules is promoted by a kind of communication sanitation, which is carried out by the group administrator and the participants themselves. Participants use a metatext, which demonstrates the reflection of the group participants’ speech activity. The existing rules in online communities are aimed at making communication emotionally comfortable, ensuring easy navigation, neutralization of aggression, and prevention of speech crimes, encouraging the users to demonstrate courtesy and display attention to one another.

There is little doubt that one of the most important areas of future research within the framework of Construction Grammar will be the comparative study of constructions in different languages of the world. One significant gain that modern Construction Grammar can make thanks to the cross-linguistic perspective is finding a clue to some contradictory cases of construction alternation. The aim of the present paper is to communicate the results of a case study of two pairs of alternating constructions in English and Russian: s-genitive (SG) and of-genitive (OG) in English and noun + noun in genitive case (NNG) and relative adjective derived from noun + noun (ANG) in Russian. It is evident that the long years of elaborate scientific analysis have not yielded any universally accepted view on the problem of English genitive alternation. There are at least five different accounts of this problem: the hypotheses of the animacy hierarchy, given-new hierarchy, topic-focus hierarchy, end-weight principle, and two semantically distinct constructions. We hypothesised that in this case the comparison of the distribution of two English and two Russian genitives could be insightful. The analysis presupposed two consecutive steps. First, we established an inter-language comparability of two pairs of constructions in English and Russian. Second, we tested the similarity of intra-language distribution of each pair of constructions from the perspective of the animacy hierarchy. For these two purposes, two types of corpora were used: (1) a translation corpus consisting of original texts in one language and their translations into one or more languages; and (2) national corpora consisting of original texts in two respective languages. It was established that in both languages, the choice between members of an alternating pair is governed by the rules of animacy hierarchisation. Additionally, it was possible to disprove the idea that the animacy hierarchy is necessarily based on the linearisation hierarchy. Two Russian constructions are typologically aligned with their English counterparts, not on the grounds of the linear order of head and modifier but on the grounds of structural similarity. The English SG and Russian NNG construction are diametrically opposed in terms of word order. However, they reveal the same underlying structure of the inflectional genitive as contrasted with the analytical genitive of the Russian ANG and the English OG. These findings speak strongly in favour of the animacy hierarchy account of English genitive alternation.

Despite the fact that legal discourse is intended to be clear, precise and unambiguous, in legal terminology there are obvious signs of cultural variability that can be observed not only in different languages, but also in varieties of the same language. Ignorance of cultural differences in legal terminology and legal discourse can lead to serious complications in an intercultural context. This study is limited to terms of reference and forms of address to judges of different levels in the British, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand varieties of English in a courtroom setting. The goal of the study is to analyze the terms of references and forms of address to judges in these varieties of English, identify their similarities and culture specific features and try to find the reasons for the differences. The data were obtained from various sources: dictionaries, legal documents, newspapers, as well as some secondary sources (Brown & Rice 2007, Hickey 2008, McPeake 2010) and Internet resources. They were analysed drawing on studies of pluricentric languages (Clyne 1992, Kloss 1967, Leitner 1992, Muhr & Marley 2015), World Englishes Paradigm (Bolton 2006, 2017; Crystal 2003, Domashnev 2000, Kachru 1985, 1986, 1988, 2008; Low & Pakir 2017, Proshina 2012, 2017, 2019); implementing comparative, semantic, pragmatic, discursive and cultural analysis. To explain some of the results, the legal and political systems of the countries that speak the national varieties of English were analysed. Preliminary results of the study revealed both similarities and differences in the terms of reference and forms of address to judges of various ranks, caused by a nexus of historical, political and social reasons that require further study. Among these, one can note the degree of openness of society to the democratization of its legal system, the country's desire to either follow the traditions established in British judicial discourse, or to demonstrate their uniqueness and independence from the former colonial power. Despite its limited nature, the study provides some new data showing that the lexical and discursive variability observed in the legal sphere contributes to the formation of varieties of pluricentric languages. The results can contribute to the study of pluricentric languages, find application in lexicographic practice, as well as in the teaching of legal English to law students.

The aim of the article is to introduce the authors’ perspective on how English loanwords are changing the structure and the content of the verbal code of Russian culture and the Russian linguistic pictures of the world, as well as on how the latter might change the former. Having used the continuous sampling method, observation method, and synchronic-diachronic approach (lexical semantic analysis, comparative semantic analysis, morphological and quantitative analysis), the authors have allocated and analyzed 487 loanwords, which led to the introduction of three distinguished types of interaction between the verbal code of the Russian language and foreign loanwords. The first interaction type is the process whereby the loanwords adapt semantically to the rules of the host language and culture, which leads to the complete change of a loanword meaning or its modification (15 words). The second interaction type is connected with the loanwords bringing new concepts to a host language and indicating borrowed ideas and objects (270 words). The differentiation of these two interaction types is based on the results of a synchronic and diachronic study of the loanwords in Russian. The analyzed interaction types are linked to the changes in the host language’s verbal code. A concept of a “hybrid linguistic picture of the world” is being introduced as the one constituting the third interaction type (201 words). According to the authors, the hybrid linguistic picture of the world is developing at the current stage of the Russian language and is caused by the process of the morphological adaptation of English loanwords, which is manifested in the production of hybrid words and Russian words being actively substituted by English borrowings.

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