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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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