Vol 28, No 2 (2024)

Two trends have become prominent in higher education worldwide. On the one hand, globalization has favored the expansion and influence of the English language. On the other hand, email has become one of the main forms of communication in academic settings, especially in teacher-student out-of-class correspondence. While these facts have increasingly attracted scholarship attention, studies in education seem to focus more on the students’ display of face(work) alone, while neglecting the teacher’s counterpart. To redress this imbalance, the present study aims to examine face(work) as displayed in students’ email requests for consideration (e.g., on late assignments submission and class attendance) and teachers’ responses. A qualitative analysis of 20 sets of teacher-student interactions reveals different strategies opted for by the students and the teacher in face(work) management. Drawing on face-constituting theory, the findings show that whilst the students are concerned with their own face alone, the teacher is concerned with how to avoid classroom conflicts in the way that attends to one’s own face, the students’ face and the classroom harmony. In this way, the management of face(work) operates in a complex and dynamic way that allows the co-construction and reaffirmation of their respective identities. For example, whilst the students’ actions overlook the relevance of the interdependence relation between them, their peers and the teacher, which is critical for the harmony of the classroom, the teacher’s actions privilege connectedness over separateness. Furthermore, the findings suggest that cultural specificities governing the backgrounds of both the teacher and the students are not always influential in the management of face in email interactions.

Motion is the cornerstone of cognitive structures which can be signified factively and fictively. Fictive motion events in English are classified into six categories (Talmy 2000a). While Iranian linguists have worked on verbs and typology of fictive motion, they almost failed to discover these categories. This study made an attempt to examine these categories by addressing the questions: What are fictive motion categories in Persian? To what extent is the speakers’ cognition influenced by the structure of the language they speak? What are Persian speakers’ preferable tenses? With this aim, using convenience sampling and qualitative research design, sixteen sentences extracted from Talmy’s model plus nine fillers were rendered into Persian. To avoid ordering effect, sixty participants were organized in a counterbalanced technique and accomplished completion and picture description tasks so that one half of the participants filled the completion task first and dealt with the picture description task later, while others acted in the reverse order. In completion task the participants performed accurately except the pattern paths category. However, they did not produce fictive motion sentences for the prospect, pattern, and advent paths, frame relative with factively stationary observer and site manifestation in the picture description task. They tended to adopt present tense in producing fictive motion sentences for the depicted categories. More importantly, the paper analyses the participants’ performance in completing the tasks related to the sixteen fictive motion categories and shows that cognition is influenced by the linguistic structure of the speakers. It is hoped that this study can be a contribution to the field of cognitive and semantic linguistics and also advance fictive motion studies in different languages.

Due to the increased pace of digitalization in all areas of life, including medicine, more citizens can receive qualified medical care. The period of the СOVID-2019 pandemic has clearly demonstrated that telemedicine is becoming a relevant area of medical practice. In particular, the role of online consultation in medical communication is significantly increasing. In this regard, medical network discourse becomes the focus of scholarly interest. Our research is aimed at verifying the scenario of medical consultations on medical online forums. The research material includes 5259 messages in Russian from 2018-2023 as part of 60 medical consultations on cardiology on rusmedserv Internet forum. The empirical study design included the collection and structuring of research material by means of corpus methods; the data were described, systematized and generalized; the qualitative interpretation of the data was carried out on the basis of the communicative and pragmatic method of analysis developed by Issers (2008). It was found that the dynamics and structure of medical consultations are generally maintained while a doctor and a potential patient are interacting through an Internet forum. The obtained data also confirm the findings presented in academic literature on “doctor - patient” communication via Internet forums. The results of the research contribute to the understanding of written medical Internet consultation proving that it unfolds inconsistently, but recurrently; the communication innovations mainly relate to the dynamics of communication scenario during medical Internet consultation deployment. The obtained results may contribute to the development of a more effective “patient - doctor” communication model focused on the mission of telemedicine.

The issues related to the polymodality of perception and various forms of intermediality are widely discussed in linguistics whereas the aspect of their interrelation is seldom considered. This research is aimed at tracing the participation of various modes of perception in the process of interaction with the world, the reflection of this process in our consciousness and memory in the form of various images up to the manifestation of those images in the intermedial relations in fiction text. The study draws on cognitive semiotics, text linguistics, polymodality and intermediality. The theoretical analysis sugessts that the polymodality of perception results in the formation of synesthetic mental images represented in the phenomenon of intermediality. The empirical material of the research includes text fragments from the works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Joyce Cary and Adam Thorpe containing samples of linguа-artistic and linguа-musical techniques of writing as forms of intermediality. The intermedial analysis of the empirical material shows how the polymodality of perception determines the specificity of the authors’ creative thinking represented in the choice of language means that activate musical and visual images in the readers’ minds. As a result, such fiction texts are constituted as related to a specific art whose forms and devices are used in it. The analysis has also revealed that in the process of verbal representation of musical or artistic images language exploits all forms of its semiotic signs: symbols (for naming colours, shades of light, sounds of music), indices (allusions to works of art or their authors) and icons (the use of forms and devices characteristic of other arts). The study confirms the productivity of exploring intermedial interaction in the cognitive and semiotic perspectives to demonstrate the relations between perception, conceptualization and the embodiment of the results in fiction text.

In the first quarter of the XXI century, world-modeling has been actively discussed in the theory of literature, text studies and discourse studies. The concept of world-modeling in linguistics significantly differs from that in literary studies, which determines the relevance of this research. The paper aims to review the publications by Russian scholars that raise the problems of world-modeling in communication, to highlight the dominant tendencies of research within the framework of the cognitive-discursive paradigm and to discuss their theoretical potential. The sample consists of 334 publications retrieved from eLibrary database. The paper argues that due to the influence of the dominant paradigm in linguistics, an independent cognitive and discursive trend of world-modeling research is being developed in Russia, and is becoming more specific, which leads to the emergence of discrete areas of research that accumulate their own system of concepts. The paper discusses the research potential of lingua-cognitive, conceptual, functional, axiological, semantic, stylistic, lingua-ideological, cognitive and pragmatic trends. The author argues that the logic of the development of discrete trends is determined by the inter-paradigm interaction, thanks to which knowledge about the representation of the world in communication is built on general paradigmatic principles as well as the achievements of particular disciplines. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the lingua-cultural, socio-semiotic, lingua-personological and psycholinguistic research traends observed in some recent publications. The interdisciplinary nature of modern linguistics makes it possible to combine several perspectives of the world-modeling analysis. The results of the study can contribute to the further development of the cognitive and discursive world-modeling theory in linguistics and social studies.

-