RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics

This article discusses one-sided screen discourse and the properties of encoding and decoding in it. The relevance of the research is conditioned by the dominance of artificially created screen information environment in modern communication and its increasing influence on the formation of public opinion, including through the distortion of information. The aim of this article is to describe the communication that takes place in one-way screen discourse in terms of encoding and decoding, as well as to identify the influence of these processes on information exchange. The source of material of the study was the detective series “Voskresensky” (8 episodes, 1 season), a total of 432 min were analysed. Screen discourse, being a part of mass communication, is inextricably linked to the activity and “sociality” of the communicative process. In this regard, this study adopts the activity concept and also implements a special discursive-semiotic approach to the organisation of screen discourse. Interpretation, analysis, synthesis, descriptive method, method of contextual analysis, functional-pragmatic methods were chosen as research methods. In the course of the research the following results were found. Information exchange in screen discourse can be characterised as: free, disequilibrium and mediated. Engineering and constructive activity is its main support. When encoding a screen message, the addresser, using a variety of codes according to his own intention, introduces variants and various possibilities into it, allowing the addressee to make a meaningful choice among them providing freedom of interpretation. The addressee, proceeding from the external expression - the meaningful structures embedded in the screen “speech” - reconstructs the process of creating the screen message, and relying on his knowledge of the “language” of screenness, through this external expression goes outwards to the content and meanings. The dialectical unity of symmetry and asymmetry is one of the main characteristics of information exchange in one-sided screen discourse. Symmetry is responsible for the ease of understanding the broadcast information, while asymmetry is responsible for endless semiosis. This combination makes it voluminous and dynamic.

The phraseological units analyzed in a comparative aspect reflect the peculiarities of the national worldview. The purpose of the study is to identify and compare the semantics and linguocultural properties of animal phraseological units with religious component in Russian and Chinese languages. The relevance of the topic is due to the insufficient study of idioms with the name of an animal component in the aspect of religious beliefs and traditions. The linguistic focus of this study is the phraseological units of the Russian language, reflecting the Christian and pagan ideas of the Russian people. The selection of the analyzed Chinese language material is due to the significant influence of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism on Chinese culture. In the work, using a set of methods and techniques, such as linguocultural analysis, comparative analysis, and classification, the phraseological units of the Russian and Chinese languages with names of marine animals components birds, and terrestrial animals are studied. Similar and different figurative and symbolic meanings of animals are revealed in the two linguocultures. Discrepancies in the national and cultural connotations of animal images among speakers of Russian and Chinese languages against the background of religious and confessional differences have been established: the image of the same animal in different linguistic cultures generates different meanings. In addition to the discrepancies, Russian and Chinese idioms reveal semantic similarities due to the commonality of moral and ethical doctrines of Russian and Chinese speakers.

The study reviewst how traditional gender norms are parodied in Kazakh. Stereotypes of “male” and “female” characteristics are evolving in the age of cultural globalization. The old notion that a man provides for the family needs financially and a woman tends to the home has evolved. In modern Kazakh society, a woman can earn significantly more than a male or serve as the family primary breadwinner. Many men believe that raising children and taking care of the home is the domain of women, so they do not want to be involved in these roles. Gender stereotypes prevailing in society prevent both women and men from living, determining their behavior and lifestyle. The relevance of the problem under consideration lies in the fact that the factors contributing to the formation of gender stereotypes have not been sufficiently studied. The parodies of the Kazakh people reflect traditional family and tribal relations based on patriarchal attitudes. The purpose of the study is to analyze gender stereotypes in Kazakh proverbs and sayings. Due to the large number entries of the main sample, 154 paremias were taken through a representative sample and grouped into five categories according to their content: 1. The role of men and women in the family, 2. Education of girls - education of the nation, 3. Preservation of family life, 4. Feminine and masculine qualities, 5. A woman mother gives birth to offsprings. The study used comprehensive research, contextual analysis, comparison and descriptive methods. As a result of the study, the stereotype “A woman is the basis, and a man is the breadwinner of the family” has partially lost its relevance today. In modern Kazakh society, the wife not only supports family comfort, but also earns quite well. The stereotype “A mother woman gives birth to offspring” always remains the same relevant, since the main function of a woman is procreation. The traditional stereotype of “Educating girls - educating the nation” is formed in relation to the upbringing of girls in the family. Since girls are future mothers and guardians of the hearth, from an early age they are prepared for family life, motherhood and household chores. The stereotype associated with the preservation of family life depicts a woman as a man’s support, an incomparable companion, his luck and even paradise. The key to a happy family life is a good spouse, so stereotypes are formed regarding the preservation of family life.

The study of semiotics is closely related to the reader’s interpretation of the text. Narrative is our fundamental means of comprehension and expression for this time-locked condition. Any semiological system is a system of meanings, but the consumer of myths takes meaning for a system of facts. The purpose of this study is to use R. Barthe’s semiotic analysis to study the process of news consumption that causes negative perceptions of government policies by recipients. The research concept uses critical media theories to view news with negative connotations as leading to panic, making people more marginalized in meeting their daily needs. According to R. Barthes, all cultural phenomena, like types of communication, are encoded in sign systems, which are the product of myth-making activity, where any culturally significant phenomenon is a speech utterance that is the carrier of a mythical message. The subject of the study is an emergent discourse in which there is a “meaning effect” for Indonesian audiences located on dozens of islands, affecting their core interests. Previous studies support this research. The unit of analysis is news regarding the policy of increasing gasoline prices in the largest Muslim country with 300 million population in the both national and local media in 2022-2023. The results of Barthes’ semiotic analysis of the signifier show that people are becoming more marginalized as the results of increasing petrol price policy. Signified without the approval of the people’s representative institutions, petrol prices continued to increase. The denotative sign for policy makers to increase gasoline directly increases the price of gasoline, which makes it more difficult for people to engage in economic activities. The connotative signifier in the title and content of the news has a very detrimental effect on people when purchasing petrol. The connotative sign means that the news can annoy the people because of the increase in petrol prices to run their economy. On the other side the government’s advice is to listen to institutions like media that represent the people and get involved in units that communicate directly with the people.

The article studies functional features of verbs involved in the expression of interpersonal relations in the Russian and Chinese languages. Considering this group of verbs as a subfield of the general lexical-semantic field of attitude verbs is primarily conditioned by the fact that it expresses relations arising among people in the form of feelings, judgments and appeals to one another in course of everyday life. The group of verbs with a variety of both direct and figurative meanings, which are used in different spheres of human communication, is analyzed. The analysis of the studied verbs allows us find out the ways of their realization and appropriate the means to describe human relations in the Russian and Chinese languages. In accordance with the aim and objectives of the study, the article considers cases of expressing relations using adverbs in some constructions of fiction texts, which allows us reveal such features of relations as multiple repetition, duration and length. The analysis of this group of verbs of interpersonal relations helps us understand the semantic structure of the verb that plays a leading role in the context and show the characteristics of the author’s individual expression of interpersonal relations. It was revealed that in isolated cases the verb in Chinese can fulfill the function of a subject, which is explained by the syntactic peculiarities of the structure of this language. The results of the study confirm the hypothesis of incomplete correspondence between the functional features of verbs of interpersonal relations in the two languages under comparison.

The issues of interlingual Slavic homonymy are being examinedi n a multifaceted way on the material of the East, West and South Slavic languages. Given research problem is one of the most actual in comparative linguistics, translation studies, as well as in the practice of teaching Slavic languages. On specific examples cases of manifestation of homonymy are analysed, the causes of its occurrence are studied, the character, linguistic, as well as extralinguistic factors that accompany this semantic phenomenon are described. Among other things, unlike most scientific works devoted to this topic, the problem we touch on is considered at all basic levels of the language: phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, stylistics, and phraseology, a theoretical substantiation of the reasons for the appearance of homonyms in the language (resp. languages) is given. Special attention is paid to full and partial homonyms, which developed on the basis of both phonetic and etymological-semantic commonality of vocabulary or, conversely, accidentally coincided in pronunciation. It should be emphasized the relevance of this problem andi ts scientific and practical significance in the framework of the contrastive study of closely related languages, which is also of particular importance for the theoretical study and practical solution of linguistic and cultural issues of the Slavic community, which, in comparison with other Indo- European language groups, disintegrated relatively late (V-VI centuries AD). Despite the fact thatm uch attention is paid to this problem in Slavic studies, and many works are devoted to describing cases of interlingual Slavic homonymy, including dictionaries fixing homonyms in two or several languages, the importance of this study lies precisely in the fact that its main goal has become a broad linguistic review with the maximum possible coverage of all three groups of Slavic languages - starting with Russian and Ukrainian in the East, Polish, Czech and Slovak in the West, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian in the South of the Slavic World and ending with its “periphery” - Slovenian in its South West. As tertium comparationis for the authors of the proposed study is the genetic commonality, genetic relationship of the Slavic languages and, accordingly, the etymological relationship of their lexical structures. The article presents some of the most illustrative, commonand frequent homonyms, including that of representing the translation problem of the so-called “false friends of the translator”. Although the general list of examined homonyms is far from exhaustive, the materials of the article can serve as a solid theoretical and practical basis for creating a fundamental dictionary of interlingual Slavic homonyms.

The authors conduct a critical analysis of the process of commercialization and commercial nomination in the linguistic landscape of Almaty, the largest megalopolis in Kazakhstan. Two sets of current toponymic problems of the linguistic urban landscape are considered: critical analysis of geospace commercialisation process, megalopolis toponymic policy, where toponym acts as a “commodity”; and sociolinguistic features of ergonym formation, linguocreative approach to the nomination process as a parto f modern naming of the megalopolis linguistic landscape. These two main aspects of the study are aimed at revealing the polylingual, socio-cultural image of the city, at matching the linguistic picture of the world of the citizens, at defining the image strategy in the organisation of urbanonymic space of the metropolis. The issue of urbanonymic terminology also remains relevant, in this regard the study deals with the problem of correspondence/ non-conformity of English and Russian terminology in this area, with some caution it is proposed to adapt the international terminological space in the field of onomastics. The analysis of the linguistic identity of oikodomonyms (name of residential complexes) and ergonyms (brandname) confirms the hypothesis of a growing trend of the urban landscape westernisation, which is of concern in view of the increasing globalisation processes that minimise the national-cultural identity of urbanonyms. As a result of the study the problem areas in the toponymic policy of the metropolis were revealed, the prospects for improving the regulatory aspects of the activities, naming technologies and branding of commercial organisations, companies were identified, alternative solutions were proposed, which can be further applied as guidelines in the toponymic activities in other regions of Kazakhstan.

Wine drinking as a cultural phenomenon is becoming the subject of research in various sciences, such as art history, cultural studies, semiotics, philology, etc. The situation of wine drinking as a fragment of the semantics of the text is the subject of the linguopoetics of the text and linguoculturology. The purpose of this study is to consider the situation of wine drinking, its functioning in the world of a work of art. The material for the work is a selection of examples extracted from prose, from the second half of the XIX century to the present days. A wide time span allows us to trace understanding and interpretation of wine drinking situation in dynamics. The examples contain bacchic vocabulary, i.e. lexemes that have the meaning ‘to drink alcohol’. The relevance of the study is related to its entry into the circle of interpretive semantic research, in which the authors pay attention to features of both the idiosyncratic traits of the writer and universal, nationwide, inherent characteristics of the period of time. The main research methods are continuous sampling method for extracting illustrative material from literary works of writers that contain bacchic vocabulary; as well as semantic and descriptive methods. The main functions of the wine drinking situation in texts are, firstly, plot-modeling, promoting the narrative outline of the work; secondly, background, reproducing the historical and cultural background of the event line; thirdly, characterizing, defining the properties and qualities of a character described, a participant of the event. The paper also shows how the world of an artistic work reflects a historical and cultural period, the realities relevant to it, as well as the individual author’s arsenal of linguistic means, which is a representative of a subjective view and assessment. It is concluded that tracing the dynamics of the situation of wine drinking through the study of bacchic linguistic means makes it possible to determine the dominant in a particular period of time.

Humanism as an epistemology began to develop back in the Renaissance, but today the conceptual field of humanism continues to be refined: philosophers, literary critics and other representatives of humanitarian knowledge are asking questions about the boundaries of humanism, about its qualification as a proclamation of the value of life and the dignity of an individual subject, about its status as a social phenomenon that should be considered diachronically. The article examines the philosophical category of humanism on the material of the postmodern novel cycle “Dreams of the Damned” by A. Zhaksylykov. Despite the fact that humanism as an epistemology began to develop back in the Renaissance, today its conceptual field continues to be refined: philosophers, literary critics and other representatives of humanitarian knowledge are asking the question what the boundaries of humanism are whether it can be qualified as a proclamation of the value of life and the dignity of the individual subject - or is it a social phenomenon that should be considered diachronically? Literature, especially the literature of postmodernism, answers the question posed differently. Postmodernism is an artistic trend that seemingly rejects humanism as it is. Its main vector, on the contrary, is the dehumanization of both the individual and society. A deliberately travesty manner of presentation, concentrated intertextuality, and modification of canonical texts of the past create a mode of perception in which it is impossible to consider humanism as a holistic idea outside of satirical or ironic overtones. However, in Kazakh modern prose we find examples of works of art that overcome this trend. These include the novel cycle “Dreams of the Damned” by A. Zhaksylykov. The relevance of the chosen topic lies in the fact that the postmodern work is analyzed from the point of view of the concept of humanism: such an approach allows us to draw conclusions about the importance of historical memory and the authenticity of ethnocultural scenarios. The object of study is the concept of humanism, the subject is the implementation of humanistic discourse in a literary text. The research material was the cycle “Dreams of the Damned” by the Kazakh writer A. Zhaksylykov. The purpose of the work: to comprehend the category of humanism through the artistic mode and to prove that, in line with postmodernist discourse, dehumanization is “inverted humanization.” Research methods: descriptive, hermeneutic commentary method, intertextual analysis method.