Discursive practices are looked upon as the core notion of discourse theory and the main instrument linguists can operate with studying language in connection with society and a human being. In this introductory article we will look into how language, culture and ideology are intertwined in diverse discursive practices and how these practices are shaped by people representing various cultures, ideologies and social entities. As part of linguistic discourse theory, we will briefly outline the major objectives and tenets of discourse theory or discourse analysis and track down the reasons why discourse theory turned into a dominant linguistic paradigm in the new millennium. Besides, some light will be thrown on the advancements and debatable questions arising within discourse theory as reflected in its methodology. Then we will give a brief synopsis of each individual paper and highlight theoretical and methodological contributions and innovations proposed by our authors. The results of the discussion as well as a brief outlook on future research will be summed up at the end of the introductory article.

All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. However, speakers of different European languages tend to relate to God in different ways. Each group has its own characteristic ways of addressing God, encoded in certain words, phrases and grammatical forms, which both reflect and shape the speakers’ habitual ways of thinking about God and relating to God. Often, they also reflect some other aspects of their cultural memory and historical experience. In this paper I will compare the meanings of the vocative expressions used for addressing God in several European languages, including “Gospodi” in Russian, “O God” in English, “Mon Dieu” in French, “Herr” in German, and “Boże” in Polish. But to compare those meanings, we need a common measure. I believe such a common measure is available in the “NSM” framework, from Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Wierzbicka 2014a and 2018a; Gladkova and Larina 2018a, b). The data is taken mainly from well-known works of literature, such as Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Boris Pasternak’s poem “V bol’nice” (“In Hospital”) for Russian, Charles Peguy’s Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and its English translation by Julien Green for French and English, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison poems and Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halbzehn for German. The results have shown that each European language offers its users a range of options for addressing God. Some of these options are shared, others appear to be unique to the language. All are underpinned by broader historical phenomena. The exact nature of all these links remains to be investigated.

Language and Ideology is an area of critical discourse analysis that has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The vast influence of the media has provided a need for the explicit analysis of common linguistic mechanisms, particularly those in political discourse. Codeswitching, general pattern in a speech community of switching between two or more available languages or dialects with respect to certain extralinguistic factors (Blom & Gumperz 1972) is strategically employed by politicians to gain support for elections (Jarraya 2013; Craig 2013). Senator Tim Kaine was one of the first White politicians to engage in code-switching during the 2016 presidential election, however his use of Spanish when engaging in political discourse was met with great resistance and skepticism by the media and voters, many of whom felt that he was pandering to Spanish-speaking citizens. Using a language ideologies framework, the present paper seeks to determine how code-switching was used as a political discourse device by Senator Kaine, and how its use varied based on the context of each speech. To answer these questions, four speeches given by Senator Tim Kaine during the 2016 presidential campaign were transcribed and translated. Following descriptive coding procedures by Saldaña (2015), two raters coded instances of codeswitching in each speech for key features of political discourse: a) dissemination of personal information or background; b) repetition; c) hyperbole; d) metaphor; e) metonymy; f) comparisons; 1. promises for the future; h) solidarity; i) legitimization of self as authority; and j) florid verbiage. Results show that Senator Kaine relied most heavily on code-switching during his speech in Miami, Florida, and used it as a tactic to gain support and build solidarity between himself and members of the audience. Additionally, Senator Kaine engaged in much repetition through code-switching to emphasize key points of his speech and political goals. The present study illustrates how codeswitching can be used to cultivate political favor, forge alliances, and demonstrate cultural similarities between White politicians and biand multilingual voters.

Websites of software vendors feature verbal and nonverbal means providing for a number of parameters to be taken into account in order to gain more comprehensive insights into the range and interplay of the means in use. This paper investigates the multimodal website marketing discourse of Microsoft , Oracle, and SAP relying on an approach which makes use of multimodal critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and text linguistics. The integrated framework allows for consideration of the discourse-generating intention of the locutionary source, the discourse function, verbal content categories and audio-visual techniques employed in the nonverbal discourse contributing to the global category of ideologeme consisting of key ideas and aimed at the locutionary target. The intention of such discourse is to persuade consumers to purchase IT solutions which is manifested in the persuasive function. The textual content has been investigated in terms of a set of categories such as: the theme, including IT terms; tonality, made explicit through positively charged words and imperative sentences; time and space, emphasizing time saving efforts to deal with challenges enterprise-wide. The findings are similar to those revealed in the verbal content of customer testimonial videos, with audio-visual techniques such as invigorating music, company settings, contrast colors, etc. being alike. It is of particular interest that the linguistic means in these three marketing discourses are different only when it comes to metaphorical expressions. The global ideologeme is made explicit by urging customers to optimize data and feel IT-powered performance benefits. It is conveyed through multiple antitheses such as data challenges vs. one solution, previously vs. now, old vs. new, and slowly vs. fast. The antitheses in the three marketing discourses are similar as are the typical manifestations of categories and audio-visual techniques which may encourage further research in terms of making the specific discourse of a company stand out to its customers.

This article focuses on the question of pragmatic effectiveness of threat statements in political communication, in particular, the relevance of using threats in pre-election programs and intimidating voters with the goal of forcing them to vote for a certain politician. The aim of this article is to consider pre-election threat statements as verbal regulative actions and to propose a typology of such constructive menacives taking into account the targeted orientation of their consequent component. This study is based on a corpus of threat statements realized in the presidential candidates’ pre-election programs in Russia in 2018. The total number of menacives is 1. The study investigated the data from the perspective of the theory of speech activity, speech act theory and psychosemantics. The theoretical framework of the study is an action-related approach to the analysis of speech (dialogic) acts developed in Tver semantic and pragmatic research school (Romanov 1988; 2002; 2020). The study specified 18 targeted types of menacives that have a certain pragmatic and emotional effect on voters and are characterized by different frequencies in pre-election programs. This result demonstrates that the author of the pre-election program does not know mass voter’s preferences, their emotional state and feelings well; therefore, the politician directs their menacing influence on a wide range of potential voters. The authors conclude that politicians deliberately prefer to use threat statements with negative effect on an unfocused audience trying to win the attention and votes. The analysis shows that four types of threat statements with different targeting of consequent component proved to be a pragmatically effective tool in the Russian pre-election campaign in 2018. The results of this study can be used to predict the pragmatic effect of politicians’ threat statements on voters.

The concept of frontier has been formed for a long time and in different directions. The main characteristics of a frontier - its flexible borders, a zone of space development characterised by uncertainty and instability - have proved their importance for understanding and describing the current state of the environment with regard to its social, cultural, communicative and linguistic indicators. The interdisciplinary (transcendental) potential of a frontier is realised in a complementary combination of natural-scientific and humanitarian scholarship. The aim of the present paper is to justify the scholarly integrity of the term frontier discourse the conceptual milieu of which is created through two overlapping multi-layered phenomena: frontier and discourse. The paper names the vectors of expanding the interdisciplinary possibilities of a frontier under the conditions of a discourse approach. Frontier as a flexible border is presented in the Internet communication, the socio-cultural space of the modern city, in the daily behavioural norms of the elite, in the family relations and in many other conceptual spheres the list of which remains open based on the ontological features of a frontier. Based on the examples from Russian and foreign literature, the author demonstrates the role of the frontier modus in the interpretation of literary texts whose plot, style and images are projected onto national history, culture, mentality in the by-border characteristics. Such frontier features as instability, its ability to create an interaction zone, which, under certain conditions, can lead to integration, are important for understanding the problems of modern language, speech and genre norms. The byborder territory is a place accumulating violations of traditional norms and providing the material which is necessary in order to anticipate the arising norm changes. The transformation of traditional genres and the formation of new ones also take place on frontier territories. It is concluded that frontier discourse ensures the understanding of norm movements in genre-stylistic characteristics.

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