Vol 26, No 1 (2022)

Articles

The conceptual semantics of “money” and “money verbs”

Goddard C., Wierzbicka A., Farese G.

Abstract

The central purpose of this study is to apply the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of semantic-conceptual analysis to the word ‘money’ and to related “economic transaction” verbs, such as ‘buy’, ‘sell’ and ‘pay’, as used in everyday English. It proposes semantic explications for these words on the basis of conceptual analysis and a range of linguistic evidence and taking account of lexical polysemy. Even in its basic meaning (in a sentence like ‘there was some money on the table’), ‘money-1’ is shown to be surprisingly complex, comprising about 35 lines of semantic text and drawing on a number of semantic molecules (such as ‘country’, ‘number’, and ‘hands’), as well as a rich assortment of semantic primes. This ‘money-1’ meaning turns out to be a crucial semantic molecule in the composition of the verbs ‘buy’, ‘sell’, ‘pay’, and ‘(it) costs’. Each of these is treated in some detail, thereby bringing to light the complex semantic relationships between them and clarifying how this bears on their grammatical properties, such as argument structure. The concluding section considers how NSM semantic-conceptual analysis can help illuminate everyday economic thinking and also how it connects with Humanonics, an interdisciplinary project which aims to “re-humanise” economics.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):7-30
pages 7-30 views

Phylogenetic trees: Grammar versus vocabulary

Polyakov V.N., Makarova E.A., Solovyev V.D.

Abstract

Traditionally, genealogical relationships between languages are established on the basis of phonetic and lexical data. The question whether genealogical relationships among languages can be defined based on grammatical data remains unanswered. The objective of this article is to compare two phylogenetic trees: one built using the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) project, and one using the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). We include data from WALS representing 27 languages from 5 language families of all continents that are deemed to be sufficiently well described. A Hamming distance matrix was calculated for all languages under study, and, based on the matrix, a phylogenetic tree was built. The trees built according to WALS and ASJP data are compared with each other and with a tree built by the classical comparative historical method. Both the ASJP-based tree and the WALS-based tree have their advantages and disadvantages. The ASJP-based tree is a good reflection of the evolutionary divergence of languages. Similarities of languages as calculated based on the typological database of WALS can provide information on the history of languages both in terms of genealogical descent and contact with other languages. The ASJP-based tree reflects genealogical relationship well at a relatively small time depth, while the WALS-based tree reflects genealogical relationship well at large time intervals. We suggest a new variant of a phylogenetic tree that includes information on both the divergence (ASJP project) and the convergence (WALS project) of languages, combining the benefits of both of these trees, although the problem of borrowings remains. The present research reveals prospects for future studies of genealogical relations among languages based on large-scale descriptions of their grammatical structures.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):31-50
pages 31-50 views

The negotiation of authorial persona in dissertations literature review and discussion sections

Fendri E., Triki M.

Abstract

Writing at a postgraduate level is not only meant to obtain a degree in a specific field but also, and more importantly, to secure that one’s research is published nationally as well as internationally. In other words, conducting research is first and foremost about making one’s distinctive voice heard. Using Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework, the present study examines the way Tunisian MA and PhD EFL researchers in applied linguistics establish a dialogue with the reader as a persuasive tool in their texts. The comparison is meant to unveil cross-generic differences in authorial voice manifestation that distinguish postgraduate writers at different degrees. A corpus of 20 Literature Review and 20 Discussion sections taken from 10 MA and 10 PhD dissertations written in English by Tunisian EFL writers is qualitatively and quantitatively explored. Linguistic markers denoting the writer’s stance are identified in the corpus and are qualitatively studied using the engagement subsystem to qualify the utterance as dialogically contractive or expansive. A quantitative analysis then compares how dialogicality is manifested across the degrees and sections using SPSS. The results show that the negotiation of voice seems to be more problematic for MA researchers in both sections in comparison to PhD writers. Dialogic contraction in the MA subcorpus conveys a limited authorial positioning in the Literature Review section and a failure to stress personal contribution in the Discussion section. PhD researchers’ frequent reliance on expansion in both sections displays their academic maturity. The critical evaluation of previous works in the Literature Review and the claim for authorial ownership in the Discussion section distinguish them from MA writers. The comparison not only stresses the strengths that distinguish PhD writers but also points out problematic instances in establishing a dialogue with the audience in postgraduate writings. The study findings can be used to consider EFL researchers’ production in pedagogical contexts in terms of identity manifestation and stance-taking strategies across the different sections of the dissertation.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):51-73
pages 51-73 views

Universality vs. cultural specificity of anger metaphors and metonymies in English and Vietnamese idioms

Tran B.

Abstract

As a human basic emotion, anger has been extensively investigated to gain insights into human cognition and psychology. From the cognitive linguistic perspective, research into metaphor and metonymy of anger across languages can shed light on the cultural models of respective speech communities. This paper looks into metaphors and metonymies of anger in Vietnamese and English idioms to find out how this emotion is conceptualized in each language, what features are universal and what characteristics are culturally specific. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory framework proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) was used for data analysis, which involves 68 English and 52 Vietnamese idioms. It was found that both languages conceptualize anger based on embodied experiences as well as cultural models. Six major conceptual metaphors of anger are identified with more diverse elaborations in Vietnamese idioms. Cultural differences are that Vietnamese makes frequent use of body parts and internal organs metonymies while English tends to utilize the whole body to describe emotional states. Vietnamese feudalist values and folk culture are also evident in the metaphorical and metonymic idioms of anger. These findings have both linguistic significance and pedagogical implications. It is suggested that awareness of conceptual motivation should be promoted when teaching idioms as figurative, metaphorically based expressions.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):74-94
pages 74-94 views

Structural and semantic congruence of Bulgarian, Russian and English set expressions: Contrastive-typological research

Lavrova N.A., Kozmin A.O.

Abstract

The main aim of the research is to analyze the degree of isomorphism and allomorphy (congruence) of set expressions in three languages - Bulgarian, Russian and English, and to highlight the main factors that have a bearing on the typological affinity of set expressions in these languages. The procedure of the research was two-fold. At the first stage, 4000 idioms were selected from Russian, Bulgarian and English idiomatic dictionaries through the method of random sampling (1334 idioms were selected from each language). For the sake of convenience and comparison, the selected idioms were divided into 5 thematic groups. At the second stage, 850 idioms were further selected for each group through stratified and quota sampling with the aim of subsequent quantification of recurrent keywords in each group. In order to quantify the number of the most frequent keywords in each group and to measure the prevalence of assonance and alliteration, the SPSS software was utilized. The results of the research revealed that the main factors that determine isomorphism and allomorphy among idioms from Bulgarian, Russian and English are (1) typological affinity between Bulgarian and English, (2) genetic kinship, (3) borrowings from English into Russian and Bulgarian and (4) from Russian into Bulgarian, (5) shared idiomatic stock and (6) such extralinguistic factors as the universal makeup of objects and entities, for instance, the same number of functional parts. The research results are relevant for comparative phraseology, areal and contrastive typology as well and for contactology.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):95-115
pages 95-115 views

A very unpredictable ‘person’: A corpus-based approach to suppletion in West Polesian

Roncero K.

Abstract

In Slavic languages, as in many other languages, the noun for ‘person’ has a suppletive paradigm. Yet, as this study shows, in West Polesian (East Slavic) the noun ‘person’ is a typological outlier not only within Slavic but also cross-linguistically because it combines three stems with a very complex distribution. This paper looks for any regularities in the distribution of these suppletive stems, their cognates among other Slavic languages and how speakers use them in free texts. This survey provides novel insights into suppletion. First, suppletion involving more than two stems is typologically uncommon but the West Polesian noun ‘person’ combines three. Second, against any expectation of regularity for the sake of learnability, free-text data show that speakers do not distribute the stems homogeneously. Third, notwithstanding the diglossic situation in Western Polesie, the inter- and intra-speaker variation in the choice of stem does not seem particularly conditioned by sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age or social class. In sum, this corpus survey of the suppletive stems of ‘person’ in West Polesian and Slavic illustrates a rare case in morphological typology where there is a three-stem suppletion combined with overabundance and a vast amount of variation across speakers.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):116-138
pages 116-138 views

Typology of pragmatic implications from the point of view of interaction between pragmatics and semantics

Kiklewicz A.

Abstract

The subject matter of the study is communicative implications as one of the forms of implementation of speech acts. The starting point is the well-known theory of H. P. Grice, in which pragmatic implications are based on the principle of cooperation. The author shows the limitations of Grice’s theory, which presents the communicative conditions of implications, but does not present the communicative consequences. As an alternative, the author proposes the concept of pragmatic implications, taking into account the premises and consequences of indirect speech acts. Considering implication as a two-place relation between antecedent and consequent, the author identifies three types of implications that differ in the type of information in the antecedent and consequent parts: 1) semantic antecedent > pragmatic consequent; 2) pragmatic antecedent > pragmatic consequent; 3) pragmatic antecedent > semantic consequent. This approach makes it possible to present indirect communication to the fullest extent, and also to explain many communicative phenomena in terms of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics. Implications are interpreted as the result of mental processing of conditionally categorical syllogisms, in which the first premise is an element of the cultural worldview. Thus, the author shows the relative nature of the opposition of conventional and communicative implications. The article uses the material of the modern Russian language, borrowed from various sources: journalism, fiction, the Internet, urban folklore and colloquial speech. The leading research method was pragmatic, namely, illocutionary, analysis with elements of discourse content analysis.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):139-161
pages 139-161 views

Pragmatic and stylistic persperctives on British and American COVID-19 cartoons

Pavlina S.Y.

Abstract

The research aims to compare and contrast British and American visual communication texts which are based on the combination on semiotically diverse modes. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis the paper explores the way a specific segment of reality - the COVID-19 pandemic - is covered in political cartoons that employ the same language but are grounded in different cultural settings. To this end, a contrastive analysis of editorial cartoons used in British and American mass media was carried out. The sample encompasses 130 British and 130 American graphical texts published in 2020-2021 on the web sites of The Guardian and U.S. News & World Report . The article focuses on the way the new meaning is produced due to the interaction of visual and verbal modes using the information shared by members of a specific linguacultural community. At first the pragmatic and functional properties of the sample texts are examined, then the stylistic features of the texts’ verbal components are studied. Taking a functional perspective, the research reveals the marked differences in two respective samples: the British COVID-19 cartoons criticize the government’s policies, whereas the American ones do not only satirize but also acclaim, creating a positive image of those responsible for vaccination production and rolling out. They tend to use slogans to mobilize the public, performing the function typical of political posters. Drawing on the stylistic analysis of linguistic resources, the paper analyzes the differences in registers and rhetorical means used by British and American cartoonists to shape their messages. Both pragmatic aspects of the cartoons and the choice of stylistic devices used in their linguistic elements proved to be culture-specific, despite the similarity of issues the texts address. The research elucidates the way the cultural landscape affects the meaning-building processes in multimodal texts that employ different variants of the same language.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):162-193
pages 162-193 views

Prices are rising, wages are falling: Argument structure of verbs denoting ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ in the Russian language

Apresjan V.Y.

Abstract

Syntactic properties of verbs in their metaphorical meanings are often explained as inherited from direct meanings. Using Russian verbs denoting ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ (‘grow’, ‘fall’, ‘lower’, etc.) as an example, we demonstrate that cognitive factors also influence syntactic properties of metaphorical meanings. The study is based on the data from the Russian National Corpus and RuSkell. We use collocation analysis to compare the semantic and syntactic properties of these verbs in their direct and figurative meanings. We show that in direct meanings their syntactic properties differ, while in figurative meanings they are considerably closer, which excludes inheritance as the primary defining factor. All the verbs have four semantic arguments with the same morphosyntactic realization: parameter (A1), initial value of parameter (A2), final value of parameter (A3) and difference (A4): Oil prices (A1) fell by fifty percent (A4), from one hundred dollars a barrel (A2) to fifty (A3). Frequency analysis reveals a disproportion in the implementation of syntactic arguments, namely, the expression of difference ( increase by fifty percent, decrease by ten times ) prevails over the expression of the initial and final values of the parameter ( increase from forty to one hundred points ). This predominance of the ‘difference’ argument is due to its cognitive advantages. Expressing difference is lexically more economical, while also more illustrative of the scale of the change: The Federal Tax Service has reported that tax collections have doubled . Theoretically, our research shows that semantic proximity alone does not guarantee syntactic homogeneity (for example, Russian synonyms slozhitʹ and pribavit’ ‘to add’ inherit different syntactic properties from their respective direct meanings): similarity of syntactic properties may have a cognitive foundation. Our practical outcome is a lexicographic template for ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’ verbs.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):194-223
pages 194-223 views

“Language thinking” from the perspective of systemic linguistics

Bakhtikireeva U.M., Valentinova O.I.

Abstract

Systemic Linguistics by Gennadii P. Melnikov, representing the interaction of linguistics and philosophy, is a system of established scholarly knowledge. An evidence-based system of knowledge that rationally certifies Melnikov's results is reflected, in particular, in the systemic typology of languages as a subfield of systemic linguistics. Like systemic linguistics in general, systemic typology of languages has not yet been sufficiently subjected to scholarly reflection. The goal of the article is to expand the scholarly discourse on the systemic approach to language. The authors focus their attention on the explanatory potential of systemic linguistics in the study of the features of thought expression in the agglutinative Kazakh language and the problem of its conveyance by means of the inflectional Russian language. The data were obtained from everyday communication, the Kazakh-Russian dictionary (2008), samples from the Kazakh-language works by Auezov, Shakhanov, Korgasbek, Suleimenov among others, and their translations into Russian. The article aims to reveal the features of dividing sense into meanings in typologically different languages. The findings substantiated and verified the provision that in typologically different languages the division of sense into meanings differs and, depending on a meaning, may be expressed by a one-word nomination or cognomination. The study has revealed the ability of an inflectional language to convey the static character of an agglutinative language and to transform this staticity into eventfulness, depending on the purpose of communication. Thus, the research has proved that the same mental content is conveyed by different means developed in languages of different morphological types.

Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):224-244
pages 224-244 views

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Koshelev, Alexey. 2020. On the Genesis of Thought and Language. Translated by Alexander Kravchenko with Jillian Smith. Moscow and Boston: Academic Studies Press

Gladkova A.

Abstract

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Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):245-249
pages 245-249 views

Review of Capone, Alessandro. 2019. Pragmatics and Philosophy: Connections and Ramifications. Cham: Springer

Morady Moghaddam M.

Abstract

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Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):250-255
pages 250-255 views

Review of Gladrov, Volfgan and Elizaveta G. Kotorova. 2021. Models of Speech Behavior in German and Russian Communicative Cultures. Moscow: YaSK Publ. ISBN 978-5-907290-48-8

Kuzmina E.S.

Abstract

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Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):256-262
pages 256-262 views

OBITUARIES

Viktor I. Shakhovskii: The father of Emotive Linguistics in Russia

Editorial board -.

Abstract

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Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):263-265
pages 263-265 views

Iosif A. Sternin: The founder and pioneer of Communicative Linguistics in Russia

Editorial board -.

Abstract

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Russian Journal of Linguistics. 2022;26(1):266-268
pages 266-268 views

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