Vol 27, No 3 (2023)

The image of a country has a critical impact on the degree of its political, economic and cultural influence in the world. This indicates a need to understand various perceptions of a country that exist among other nations and mechanisms of their formation and change in an ever-shifting world. This qualitative case study seeks to examine the changing nature of wild animal metaphors employed to model the image of Russia in American media discourse in the XIX-XXI centuries. The study is limited by two source domains, namely, the beast and the bear. They were analyzed within particular contexts: American English, culture and media discourse. The research data were drawn from dictionaries and corpora. The dictionaries included etymological and explanatory entries, as well as those covering idioms, symbols, and metaphors. The corpora research data were collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Chronicling America, a collection of historic digitalized texts. A total of 218 metaphors were selected from 4929 texts. The metaphors were studied through lexicographic, conceptual metaphor, culture-specific, corpus, discourse, and diachronic methods. The findings of this study suggest that the two metaphors “Russia is a beast” and “Russia is a bear” are frequently used in realizing the strategy of ‘othering’ in XXI century American media discourse. Still, their meanings allowed for variation and modification in the periods of the two countries’ amity and cooperation. In the XIX century and in the years of US-Soviet alliance in WWII the metaphors could evoke positive images of Russia, thus, realizing the strategy of ‘bridging’ or ‘belonging’. The contribution of this study has been to confirm that, whatever metaphorical projections exist in language and culture, historical factors determine choices in any sample of discourse. This could be important for understanding the mechanisms involved in modeling the image of modern Russia in foreign media discourses.

Mobile technologies mark an increasing construct of heterogeneous semiotic resources which coexist in a networked symmetrical interrelations. This area of research is still understudied, especially in terms of demonstrating how app-mediated touristscapes are co-told, transduced, and augmented by networked assemblage between participants and mobile interfaces. Drawing on a pragma-semiotic approach, the present study aims to investigate the spatiotemporal constitution of Dubai as a mobile-mediated touristscape. We draw on a newly synthesized approach that combines Cooren and Matte’s (2010) model of constitutive pragmatics and Pennycook’s (2008, 2017) notion of “semiotic assemblages.” Such a methodological synergy has been applied to the Dubai Travel mobile app in a way that revealed how the touristscape of Dubai has been pragmatically constituted of the semiotic assemblage of heterogeneous figures in the app’s interface-human interaction. This form of techno-human interaction was demonstrated to be situated in three spacing practices: (i) presentifying or making materially present hybrid interactions of techno-human figures, (ii) ordering or systematizing the scripted trajectories of Dubai touristscape by creating more space and time across framed intervals, and (iii) accounting or linking spatiotemporal augmentation to affective semiotic assemblages. The study found that Dubai touristscape has been constituted via a human-non-human semiotic assemblage with augmented and multilayered spatiotemporal possibilities. The pragma-semiotic approach has thus helped in arguing against what accounts as a touristscape with fixed spatiotemporal properties. The study contributes to understanding the increasing role of networked communication through developing a dialogue with linguistic pragmatics.

Primarily considered as a form of socially transmitted self-representation, reputation is one of the key concepts in public communication which makes it a worthwhile object for linguistic analysis. The present research is aimed at unveiling the semantic complexity of the lexeme ‘reputation’ by examining its immediate environment in COCA. The study showcases how the closest lexical context enhances the meaning of the lexeme. The sampling under analysis consists of 98 most frequent collocations with adjectives (4,088 tokens) and 57 collocations with verbs (6,190 tokens). The methods of the study include contextual analysis, semantic clusterisation and collostructional analysis based on statistical measure of log-likelihood. As a result, 7 semantic clusters of ‘adjective reputation’ and 8 clusters of ‘verb reputation’ have been obtained. The research proves that discoursewise, the collocations with the lexeme ‘reputation’ are found in newspaper, magazine, blog and web-general sections of COCA. The analysis reveals that in English, reputation is metaphorically represented as a building, a piece of fabric and as a valuable object made of precious metal, where it inherits the properties of tangible objects. A good reputation is earned over time by hard work and, once established, requires monitoring and maintenance. If damaged, it is not thrown away but is to be restored. Metonymically, reputation adopts the qualities of its proprietor (‘notorious reputation’, ‘unfortunate reputation’). The paper contributes to the theory of metaphor and could be beneficial for those working within cultural linguistics, lexicography and translation studies. The research may be further extended with corpus-based analysis of semantically close lexemes.

Can the Russian language be regarded as pluricentric since it is used in various countries and regions of the world where different varieties of the language have evolved? Indeed, in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and some other countries, Russian is used as the official language of state bodies and institutions. However, each of these countries has its own linguistic and cultural specificities of grammar, vocabulary and phonetics, which distinguish it from other varieties of the Russian language. In addition, the Russian language is used in countries where it is not an official language, such as Finland, Germany, Israel. There it also has its own characteristics caused by interaction with different languages and cultures. The goal of the study is to show that all these varieties of the Russian language can be viewed as pluricentric variants, i.e. as independent language systems with their own characteristics and differences. Theoretically, the recognition of the Russian language as pluricentric would help to better understand the old and emerging varieties of the language and establish their relationship with each other, making it possible to compare different varieties of the language with each other at all linguistic levels. Practically, such recognition would also make it possible to trace the adaptive possibilities of the Russian language, which vary depending on the region and cultural environment, which in turn will diversify and deepen the study of the Russian language, making it more interesting for the learner. Based on the theory of pluricentricity, the paper compares practices of the language use and seeks to establish commonalities of Russian pluricentrism. Moreover, it highlights the unique features of the Kazakhstan language variety while demonstrating new opportunities for studying the flexible adaptability of the language. This approach will contribute to better understanding and appreciating the richness and versatility of the Russian language as it is used around the world.

The paper considers benefits and drawbacks of the Picture Naming Test (PNT) as a diagnostic method suggesting the ways to improve its diagnostic and research validity. Although this test is popular in both national and international neuropsychological assessment and research practice, its use is largely due to tradition and practical convenience. However, theoretical underpinnings for its effectiveness are not sufficiently represented in the pertinent literature, which determines the relevance of the study. The major objective of the paper is to consider the PNT as a research technique from the point of view of psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and corpus linguistics and to propose integrated approaches for the further development of these tests. The material comprises picture naming tests developed for the Russian and English languages. The study sets the following aims: 1) to define the main features of PNT and the principles of its application viewed from a historical perspective; 2) to identify the theoretical foundations (linguistic and neuropsychological) for its use as a diagnostic tool; 3) to highlight the problematic aspects of the method; 4) to suggest possible ways to eliminate them. To accomplish these tasks, various methods of corpus linguistics are applied throughout the article. The historical outline of PNT development suggests that the current design might stem from earlier contexts of use. A review of existing models of lexical access provides a theoretical basis for the test in its current form and suggests possible avenues for its development grounded in experimental research, advances in linguistics and big data analysis. A separate section of the article presents critique of the most popular tests. Finally, the analysis of the existing English and Russian tests through the corpus-based methodology clearly demonstrates the need for more detailed norming and stimuli selection. By way of conclusion the authors outline the principles of designing Picture Naming Tests for specific purposes and put forward a step-by-step algorithm that enables careful selection of the necessary indicators and parameters.

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