Vol 17, No 2 (2019): Belarusian School of Cultural Linguistics

The article presents a brief essay on the scientific biography and academic career of V.A. Maslova, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Department of German Philology of Vitebsk State University named after P.M. Masherov. Valentina Maslova is one of the best-known modern Russian linguists. She is the author of more than 700 works including classic textbooks. The sphere of V.A. Maslova’s scientific interests includes cultural linguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic text analysis, language philosophy, etc. Valentina Maslova has been the leader of Vitebsk school of cultural linguistics for more than 20 years. Within this period there have been implemented several funded scientific projects, PhD theses and a doctoral thesis.

The article is devoted to the modern direction in linguistics - cultural linguistics in the aspect of teaching Russian as a means of intercultural communication. Basing on scientific papers, his own extensive scientific and pedagogical experience and needs of linguodidactics, the author proposes to determine this discipline in a wide sense considering teaching the representatives of different linguistic cultures, different traditions, customs, systems of values. The essence of culture is understood as a specific way of human life and activity, having verbal representation. Cultural linguistics is focused on the specifics of the addressee’s native culture and building the most adequate model of teaching Russian as a means of intercultural communication in modern educational space. The review article allows to consider cultural linguistics in an applied aspect relevant to the methods of teaching language, including Russian as a foreign language.

Modern linguistics focuses on recurrence as a feature and category of various units of language and speech. In this regard, the contrastive analysis of recurrence and reproducibility on the material of set units is particularly relevant. The author attempts to differentiate recurrence and reproducibility at the phrase level. The aims of the work are to establish and describe the linguistically significant parameters of the aphoristic units’ recurrence. The material of the study is about 1000 recurrent aphoristic units in modern Russian language. The units are taken from phraseological and paremiological dictionaries and identified in the speech of native Russian speakers recorded in 2001-2018. The study determines the concept of phrase recurrence as regular phrase formation in typical contexts, not as their frequency as ready-made units in speech. The study identifies that recurrent aphoristic phrases do not have stable components, figurative meanings, neither on the whole nor of their components, and nominative semantics. Recurrent phrases do not refer to the so-called speech “standards” and “stereotypes” that function as “ready-made formulas” and their components have strong connection. Recurrent phrase has free components. Among different phrases with free components, recurrent phrases are close to set phrases in their structure and way of functioning. We can argue that the categorical difference between recurrent and set units is a criterion for determining the scope of phraseology as the part of the language system.

The transition from actual knowledge to the deep one is an important characteristic of all modern humanities, including cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics. Study of deep knowledge is urgent now. The purpose of the article is to show that the allocation of language categories is a complex integrative process, since the category itself includes both general conceptual bases for combining objects having common essential properties, and knowledge of the rules and mechanisms of such combination. The author concluded that the concept of “language and culture” converge the interests of all sciences that study human beings. Therefore, modern cultural linguistics should explore not only the interaction of language and culture, but also the relationship and interconnections of language and personality, its consciousness and thinking. The article shows certain examples of language meaning in world conceptualization and categorization. It attempts to establish objective and subjective factors shaping the national world picture. One of these factors is the metaphor, which clearly reflects the national specificity of the world perception.

The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the structure of urban signs containing code switching, foreign language or pseudo-foreign language information. This topic seems to be relevant, since modern cities with a Russian-speaking population are flooded with inscriptions that mislead about foreign cultural realities and are executed with grammatical and lexical errors. In the course of the study, the names of catering establishments, beauty salons, car service enterprises and law firms, fixed on the signboards of the respective organizations and presented for public viewing were analyzed. The specificity of the designations of service enterprises of various kinds and its compliance/nonconformity with the mission of the organization has been established. Analyzing the signboards as a verbal fragment of the urban landscape, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to introduce a new term - pseudo-multicultural identity. The phenomenon of pseudo-multicultural identity characterizes the communicative space of a large city and can be considered a destructive phenomenon formed in a pseudo-other-cultural environment, where the authors of foreign names neglect both the structure and the meaning of the proposed designations, and the target audience forms inadequate language stereotypes.

The article analyses the linguistic means of modern Internet poetry having millions of readers and actively developing on the Internet. Being a kind of mass literature, the Internet poetry “complicates linguistic reality”, influencing the literary language “by virtue of its mass character” (Solganik, 2010). Therefore, the study of such “alternative” art seems relevant: it can later become the material for a new poetic theory becoming urgent nowadays. The author took as the material for the study poetic websites (“Stihi.ru”, “Izba-Chitalnya”, etc.) and thematic groups in social networks (“Rifmach”, “Filashki”, “Artichoke”, etc.). The purpose of the article is to identify the specificity of the language of the Internet poetry, analyze cases of unconventional use of language means in modern Internet poetry. Undoubtedly, not only Internet authors are looking for new forms and methods, but it is the Internet poets who consciously violate all the norms - the norms of versification, of the language, of text structure in order to reveal the potential of the language. The study revealed a lot of experiments with genres and language tools, for example in the graphic design of the text (for instance, graphic symbols in an unconventional function), in specific features of vocabulary, word formation, morphology and syntax.