This essay explores immigrants’ bilingual humor viewed as part of secondary language socialization. Adult acquisition of a new language involves reflections about languages and language play which juxtaposes and compares the mother tongue with the language of the receiving society. Acquiring a new language, émigrés do experiments with the form and create new meanings. In the early stages the bulk of bilingual humor is based on simplest interlingual puns exploiting minimal pairs, malapropisms and discovery of obscene words in foreign lexis. As immigrants’ proficiency in the language of the host society increases, their humor becomes more sophisticated focusing on social criticism and in-group solidarity rather than on mere juggling of phonetically similar words. Texts analyzed in the article testify that the Russian language has preserved its symbolic value among new Israelis and they use bilingual humor as a warning against the first-language attrition.

The article examines some of the latest Russian idioms by English origin. The semantics of these idioms has been seen on the material of the informal (including informal political) discourse, in terms of opposition personality - impersonality, in connection with some of the new trends in public life.

The paper deals with the functions of irony in the English and Russian political discourse. Such functions of irony as aggression and entertainment are analyzed. Modern tendencies in political speech, such as the loss of official style and wide usage of obscene lexis are regarded. An attempt to reveal similarities and differences in the two cultures is made. It is based on the results of empirical study. Speeches of English and Russian political leaders, taken from TV programmes and news broadcast served as the material for the research, as well as literature and the internet resources. Special attention is paid to the successfully developing genre of political parody. The author concludes that irony in political speeches is a key to success of a political leader and ensures the most powerful effect on the audience.

The article raises the problem of constructing a semantic model to describe the meaning of the grammatical category of case in the languages of different types. The main objective of this publication - to provide an overview of different points of view on the semantic structure of the category of case and to compare different models of case semantics. Initial impulse to the development of problems of case semantics became the grammar and typological ideas of A.A. Potebnya and R. Jakobson. The basis of these models, which differ from each other in the number and nature of the allocation of features is the idea of the possibility of representing grammatical meaning as a structured set of semantic features. The analysis shows that the construction of formal models of grammatical categories is impossible without referring to the content of the dominant semantic features in the structure of grammatical meaning. Despite all the difficulties of modeling grammatical semantics, to construct a semantic model of case is an interesting and promising task of general morphology and typological linguistics.

The article deals with the study of comparative analysis of actualisation peculiarities of the concept ‘iskusstvo’/‘art’ in fictional discourse in the Russian and English languages of XIX-XX centuries. The examples given are taken from Russian National Corpus, British National Corpus and texts of fiction of XIX-XX centuries. There are statistical comparative, descriptive methods and methods of discourse analysis, continuous sample from dictionaries in the analysis. The analysis shows that verbalization of this concept by use of noun prevails in fictional discourse in the Russian and English languages. An additional point is that four groups of meaning characterizing ‘iskusstvo’ and nine groups that characterize ‘art’ have been revealed.

Comparative textual analysis of the information exchange flows during the communication process allows identifying the relationship of a variety of texts conveying one meaning. Identification of parallel relations between the original text and the text of the translation in the communication process can only be of conditional nature. The text can serve as an instrument in identifying the dependence of the meaning on the pragmatic purpose of the communication process. In the terms of practice we are concerned only with the lexico-grammatical features of texts for translation and represent eight duads, which make up the functional paradigm of our research. In modern times text corpora tend to have clichéd texts due to common sources of the original information as well as coinciding propositions and presuppositions of the addressers and the addressees. Basically, we see these clichéd texts as semantically and quite often formally parallel. Parallel texts can be used for comparison in an intralingual environment at all levels of the language system. Our research shows that there are three main types of parallel texts which correlate with the three components: pragmatics, semantics and syntagmatics. Our theoretical frameworks have been applied in teaching foreign languages as well as translation skills to senior students with SDL TRADOS translation software used as a teaching tool on the point “This is how I do it, now you do it better”.