RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics

This study investigates the evolution of lexical meanings within changing linguocultural contexts, focusing on the acquisition of new senses and perceptions by linguistic units. The aim of the study is to analyze the functioning of the lexical unit narrative, which is a mental product reproduced by the human being through discursive activity and considered as a substitute for the word rhetoric as an analogue of speech act. The multiplicity of designations of this word (rhetoric as an analogue of story, history, text, discourse, point of view, perspective) is based on its perception as a linguistic tool with broad capabilities, a special semiosis of the cultural-linguistic picture of the world in the correlation between language, culture, and communication. The analysis explores the semantics and pragmatics of narrative as a semiotic sign within media texts. It highlights the implementation of its pragmatics to convey axiological (positive or negative) evaluations. Furthermore, the study identifies and interprets the various types of designata associated with this word-sign in contextual usage.

Description of the potential of digital traces for studying the dynamics of semantic changes in Anglicisms in the Russian language using the tool Google Ngram was conducted on the material of the electronic library Google Books. The aim of the study is to propose an algorithm for working with the Russian-language segment of the Google Books library in order to study the dynamics of semantic changes of the borrowed word. The example of the lexeme лофер(ы) proposes a methodology of work using the tool Google Ngram to determine the status of a foreign word in the language-recipient across its different meanings at different stages of development of the language. The tested methodology allows to conclude that the status of the unit лофер(ы) has changed in Russian from an exoticism in the meaning of idler, loafer to an Anglicism in the meaning of shoes. At the same time, the initial borrowing of the word лофер in the meaning of idler, loafer into Russian in the 19th century did not affect the formal stability of the Anglicism лоферы/лоуферы in the meaning of shoes in modern Russian. The proposed procedure for analyzing borrowed vocabulary based on digital traces can be used in lexicology, lexicography, and etymology, as it allows resolving disputed cases regarding the period of a lexeme’s entry into the recipient language, its meaning, and status in the receiving language.

Hypotheses in the field of polysemous words functioning in the lexicon attract the attention of modern researchers. Currently, there is widespread support for the “checklist” theory of their meanings functioning as unconnected units. The introduced in the article hypothesis reflects the connectionist approach to the problem. A justification for the concepts of “General significance” and “Lexical invariant” is proposed. The aim of the study is to create a lexical invariant model of a polysemous word based on its empirical invariant-component analysis. Lexical invariant is represented as a set of basic dominant components that form the word semantic core. Based on the methods of comparative and component analysis, the concept of “General significance” is verified. A long-standing debate about its existence is presented. The empirical invariant-component method was used to analyze the semantics of a polysemous word key. The correlated dominant metaphorical clusters proved the semantic integrity of a word structure. The proposed hypothesis has a number of advantages over the “checklist” theory. It explains the reasons for lexical meanings boundaries uncertainty, revealing the patterns of schematization in lexical networks. In the process of decoding polysemous words, the communicator does not consider all semantic components of a word. The obtained results can be applied in compiling dictionaries. Lexical invariants can serve didactic purposes in vocabulary expansion.

The study of ornithonyms, which represent an important layer of our vocabulary, is of significant value for both biological and linguistic sciences. The disappearance of bird names following the loss of the species themselves makes it urgent to fix and preserve them. If biologists strive to preserve fauna, then linguists are responsible for preserving names, since ornithonyms, as well as the stable expressions and paremiological units in which they are used, reflect elements of national consciousness, cultural beliefs and a historically formed worldview. Ornithonyms are not only the names of specific biological objects, but also a valuable linguistic unit capable of reflecting the lexical richness and features of the ethnocultural picture of the world. This article examines the ornithonyms recorded in the medieval Turkic writing monument “Kitab Tarjuman”, in comparison with their counterparts in modern Kazakh language. The research includes a lexical and semantic analysis of these units, the identification of their correspondences in related Turkic languages, as well as the study of their use in Kazakh proverbs and sayings. The work is aimed at identifying the continuity of lexical units and preserving the linguistic heritage. The results of the study demonstrate that ornithonyms reflect the ethnocultural picture of the world, national mentality and are valuable for linguistics as structural elements of language, enriching the cognitive, ethnolinguistic and diachronic studies on the Turkic heritage. Linguistic analysis of the Kitab Tarjuman monument makes it possible to recreate the worldview of the ancestors, and proverbs and phraseological units with ornithonyms serve as an important source for studying the cognitive and ethnolinguistic aspects of the language. 

Ethnopoetics is an integrative discipline in the humanities, whose main task is to study the national characteristics of specific literatures by appealing to semiotic elements of varying degrees of complexity - archetypes and archetypal motifs, concepts-sensibilities, cultural codes (from spatial to spiritual), and genre structures. All of the above units act as ethnopoetic constants - recurrent and retransmitted concepts that form national linguistic worldviews, manifested in a work of art as a semiotic field of a complex, palimpsestic nature. The purpose of this study is to analyze the ethnopoetic constants of Kazakhstani Russian-language artistic discourse from the point of view of their semiotic affiliation. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of the sensibility concept “EMSHAN” (“wormwood”) and its correlation with the archetypal complex “HOME.” The material for the study was the eponymous story (“poem in prose”) by M. Simashko, narratively organized as a sequence of events possessing the semiotic characteristics of consecutiveness, unity, irreversibility, transformativeness, and the subject’s crossing of the semiotic boundary. In the course of the study, we came to the conclusion that ethnopoetic constants are not only formants of the linguistic picture of the world of a particular ethnic group, but also serve as the substrate basis of the aesthetic whole. The taxonomic distribution of ethnopoetic constants is the perspective of this study. 

A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Xinhua News Agency materials from 2020 to 2024 is devoted to the media’s representation of Russia’s climate policy. The aim of the study is to fill a gap in existing scientific works, which mainly focus on Russia’s climate policy from the point of view of international relations or environmental sciences, ignoring the systematic analysis of media discourse in formation “climatic identity” of Russia. Utilizing the Factiva database, a specialized corpus was compiled and analyzed via AntConc 3.5.9, applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis framework (textual, discursive, and social practice levels). Findings reveal that Chinese media consistently portray Russia as a strategic partner in climate governance, emphasizing international cooperation, economic development, policy measures, ecological conservation, and energy transition. The positive framing aligns with China’s national climate strategy and reflects Russia’s growing geopolitical influence as both a major emitter and carbon sink. The study contributes to understanding how media discourse constructs cross-border ecological narratives, offering insights into the interplay between national policies, global climate governance norms, and Sino-Russian strategic relations.

In the digital age social media have become a central space for expressing moral values, with “justice” being one of the most frequently invoked concepts. However, the semantic nuances and rhetorical articulations of this category remain underexplored. This study aims to examine how the notion of justice is articulated by Russian-speaking social media users through rhetorical strategies and linguistic devices. The empirical basis consists of over 70,000 user-generated messages collected from Russian social media platforms between September 2023 and September 2024. Data was filtered using a core of 38 stable linguistic markers and processed with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), k-means clustering, and qualitative discourse analysis. The analytical framework incorporates theories of pragmatics, evaluative language, and critical stylistics. Key strategies identified include normative appeals to law and morality, emotionally charged statements, hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, and cultural references. The discourse is predominantly marked by a negative tone reflecting distrust and frustration, while the ideal of justice remains an important moral reference. The articulation of justice in digital environments reveals both the enduring importance of this value and the growing skepticism toward its institutional realization. Understanding these rhetorical strategies provides insight into public sentiment and offers potential tools for more effective communication between institutions and society.

Alexithymia is a specific cognitive state characterized by difficulties in consciously identifying and expressing one’s emotions, as well as externalizing emotional and physical sensations. Over the past fifty years, alexithymia has been actively studied by researchers in various fields, as it is an interdisciplinary phenomenon with obvious clinical significance, primarily due to its comorbidity with neurological, somatic, and psychiatric disorders. The aim of this study is to analyze psycho- and neurolinguistic research on alexithymia, discuss contemporary perspectives on the mechanisms underlying emotion and sensation awareness and verbalization in individuals with high alexithymia levels, and characterize the lexical and grammatical features of their speech. (specificity in nomination, perception of units with metaphorical components, part-of-speech processing, utterance structure, pragmatic characteristics), features of processing verbal and non-verbal information related to emotions and sensations. The authors note the presence of complex difficulties in the cognitive processing of emotions associated not only with the linguistic aspects of the problem, and touch upon the problem of alexithymia in adolescents. Changes in the field of measuring the level of alexithymia (a gradual move from questionnaires representing self-reports to automatic diagnostics using computer programs) are discussed, and promising areas of alexithymia research are presented.

The scientific novelty of the practical consideration of the influence of external determinants on the language system lies in the fact that for the first time the concepts of external and internal determinants, proposed by G.P. Melnikov, are explained using the example of tense system of languages of different structural types. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the practical application of the principle of external determinants by analyzing the system of four languages: Russian, English, French and Tatar. The results showed the reflection of the external determinant at the morphological level. In the agglutinative Tatar language, the tense system reflects the external determinant - the need to distinguish between a witnessed event and a report about past events based on secondhand information. In the French, Russian and English as nominative-accusative languages with an event-based communicative perspective, the tense systems have adapted to the external determinant - the need to communicate about an actual event or an irrelevant long-past event by differentiating between completeness / processivity. In the synthetic inflectional French language, the perfective aspect is further differentiated based on distance from the present moment, which serves to single out recent events in narration. In the inflective synthetic Russian language, this differentiation is realized at the level of verb semantics - by dividing all verbs into perfective and imperfective ones. In the inflective analytical English language, differentiation of processivity is presented on the basis of temporal exhaustion (the presence of an interval), contact with the present moment (duration). The most general abstract meanings of the language system are subject to grammaticalization; the meaning of completeness/incompleteness at the communicative level corresponds to the relevance/irrelevance of information. Processivity is associated with the meaning of the event's relevance - it is still happening or was happening at a moment in time that can be identified. Completeness is related to the meaning of irrelevance - the event has exhausted itself in time, and in the case of limiting verbs, has reached its internal limit. The event perspective is based on the exchange of information about unfinished and completed events. 

Language plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion. The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris during the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign, with a specific focus on their impact on indecisive voters in swing states. It aims to reveal the dynamics of how populist discourse and strategy communication can shape voter perceptions and decisions in high-stakes elections. This research strategy was a mixed-method approach combining qualitative thematic analysis with quantitative evaluations. Speeches were collected from YouTube then, transcribed by using the software Note-GPT, to find out the patterns in discourse, followed by thematic coding to do the exact textural analysis. Rhetorical approaches vary significantly, according to the result strategies. Trump’s populist narrative leverages nationalism, economic revival, and border security, often couched with an “Us versus them” ideology that was designed to exploit the social divides and incite voter worries. Appealing to voters’ frustrations and worries, his emotionally charged direct tone effectively galvanized support. In contrast, Harris centered on an optimistic and inclusive tone about the principles of democracy in her speech, delivered with hope aimed at fostering unity and motivating them to take action as a collective power. The study highlights the breakthrough of new evidence that different rhetorical approaches influence voter engagement, in different ways. Harris aimed to bridge the divisions and champion collective democratic ideals, while Trump’s strategy stressed divisiveness, polarization, and urgency. These findings highlight the importance of tailored messaging in influencing voter behavior, public opinion, and electoral outcomes. With its valuable implications for future campaign tactics, this study provides a systematic insight into the interplay between rhetoric, emotional appeal, and strategic voter involvement.

Medical linguistics has developed a distinct genre with established characteristics that recur in medical discourse across various linguistic cultures. This study aims to identify the constitutive features of two genres of medical discourse - the medical poster and the medical cartoon - as realized through polycode texts in English and Chinese. A comparative analysis of the medical poster and cartoon in English and Chinese revealed that the stable genre characteristics of the medical poster include the implementation of an informational function, a limited thematic scope, a thesis-based textual structure, the duplication of verbal information through visual means (drawings and diagrams), and a consistent color code. Medical cartoons, continuing the tradition of European political caricature, serve to satirize the professional and personal qualities of doctors, the complexities of doctor-patient interaction, patient anxieties regarding treatment, the dichotomy of paid versus free healthcare, and medicine as a social institution. The use of color code and precedent-based visual phenomena is also noted in cartoons. Their verbal component is primarily realized through dialogic communication while the visual component ranges from simple sketches to detailed illustrations.

The topicality of the undertaken research is determined by significant influence exerted by media discourse on all spheres of society. Media discourse has a special persuasive effect on the recipient, addressing pressing issues. Since all areas of human life are closely interconnected, this is often reflected in media discourse, within the framework of which there is an intersection and interaction of different discourses, resulting from the juxtaposition of signs belonging to various discourses. This results in the consideration of a certain situation or object through the prism of another situation, object, the signs of which belong to a different historical period, culture, people, etc. The interaction of signs leads to interaction between cognitive models of situations represented by signs: some of their components become dominant, which, in turn, leads to the expression of the fundamental categories of existence and actionality. The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon of poly-discursiveness - an interaction between the signs of different discourses and their cognitive structures, which, in turn, expresses the fundamental semantic categories. The research was undertaken on the basis of a media text published on the National Geographic website. During the study, the method of discourse analysis, the method of semiotic analysis and the method of dictionary definitions were employed. The authors come to the conclusion that the inclusion of signs of other discourses into the media discourse makes it poly-discursive, resulting in a multidimensional representation of a certain object or event. Signs of other discourses also contribute to the fact that a certain object is simultaneously considered from the points of view of different discourses. Linguistic signs, which underline certain components of cognitive models of situations in the process of discourses’ interaction, are also means of expressing the categories of existence and actionality, which become dominant within the framework of media discourse.