Vol 12, No 2 (2021): Image of a Language Personality in the Language Studies of the XXI Century

This article is dedicated to the 85th anniversary of Yuri Nikolaevich Karaulov, Russian linguist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology, Professor, Laureate of the USSR State Prize. The main areas of Professor Yu.N. Karaulov’s research interests are: 1) theory of language personality, 2) cognitive linguistics, and 3) theory and practice of lexicography. Professor Yu.N. Karaulov is the founder and head of the leading scientific school “Russian Language Personality”, the creator and one of the developers of the “Machine Fund of the Russian Language” (a system of complex computerization of linguistic research). The list of works of the outstanding researcher boasts more than 300 scientific papers, 13 monographs and 11 dictionaries. This article presents an overview of papers-reports of the participants in the International round table “Language Personality: Results and Prospects of the Study”, dedicated to Professor Yuri Nikolaevich Karaulov.

The article presents the results of the study dedicated to native speakers “sites of memory” associated with key images of the Russian national culture. The investigation was inspired by the work of French historians “Les lieus de mémoire” (1984), whose ideas Yuri Nikolayevich Karaulov applied to the Russian Associative Dictionary (RAD). The study was initiated with the hypothesis elaborated by Yu. N. Karaulov that the Russian national memory could be studied through associative dictionaries. This provision is based on the linguistic personality concept formulated by Yu. N. Karaulov that is regarded as a personality expressed in a language / text and can be reconstructed on the basis of linguistic means. The texts that a language personality produces reflect the peculiarities of a person’s vision of the environment (worldview). The hypothesis is tested on associative fields of the toponym Moscow and the lexemes war and Sunday using the data of several associative dictionaries compiled from 1988 to the current moment, i.e., the Russian Associative Dictionary, and Yu. N. Karaulov among the authors, as well as a number of later dictionaries developed on the basis of massive associative experiments carried out in the regions of Russia. The content and structural analyses of the associative fields of stimuli Moscow , war , and Sunday show that the associative material largely reflects the discursive space of the language personality and its functioning in texts that reproduce these “sites of memory” in a precedent form. The latter, however, can be found as various types of reactions (predications) of a non-stereotyped nature. Therefore, the sought-for data exist in different guises, obviously depending on the historical time and the discursive experience of native speakers of a language/culture, as well as on the region of their residence. This study confirms the psycholinguistic concept of meaning (including the associative one) as a sociocultural phenomenon.

The article presents the results of a pilot experiment carried out within the framework of psycholinguistics and aimed identify the structure and content of the value system and the image of the future of generation Z. The relevance of such studies is substantiated; a complex of methods is described that allows: 1) reveal the specifics of the value system and the image of the future as its subsystem; 2) highlight the most significant signs of the studied phenomena in the group consciousness; 3) draw conclusions on the motives determining the hierarchy of values. The results of the analysis allow us conclude that at present there is a change in the connections between the elements of the structure of values, the core of which is the desire for life only by the interests of the inner circle of people and material prosperity. It is assumed that the experimentally recorded trend could be explained either by the ongoing gradual replacement of the values of traditional culture with the values of an individualistic society, or by the contradiction between social archetypes (according to K. Kasyanova), which determine the national type of linguistic personality (according to Yu.N. Karaulov) and the external form of the state as that society section, which quite rigidly tries to fix the main parameters of society of a certain state. It is argued that the lack of a clear understanding of the causes of what is going on, as well as the importance of the problem for society, determines the need for further research in this direction.

The specific national characteristics of stimulus Homeland in Russian and Spanish verbal associative network are described in this article. The contrastive analysis of one of the basic word-model-points, inherent to the Russian and Spanish native speakers, is being investigated for the first time. The qualitative indicators of the performed analysis constitute a kind of thesaurus of the associative norms of the Russian and Spanish languages and, together with the quantitative ones, can be the subject of linguo-psychological comparative analysis and provide additional information about the associative norms, structure, linguistic ability and national character of the speakers of the given language and culture.The theme may be interesting for specialists not only in philology, but also in psychology, sociology, culturology, mass media, commercial advertizing and other spheres connected with human activity.

The article is focused on the analysis of the stimulus “The Great Patriotic War” based on the data of both directed and free associative experiments, held among the young Russians aged 18-23, the students of the Philological faculty of RUDN University. The aim of this research is to study the ordinary language consciousness of common speakers of the Russian linguoculture through the prism of their attitude to the Great Patriotic War as a cultural phenomenon. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the experimental data allow us conclude about the mediated perception of the Great Patriotic War by young Russians, who have knowledge about the war from secondary sources: fiction and documentary films, history and literature textbooks. On the material of these associative experiments, the experimental associative fields are formed, which could potentially become a part of the associative dictionary of the contemporary Russian younger generation. In the course of the study, semantic crossings are revealed between the lexical units of the formed associative fields and the data from Russian associative dictionaries. A comparative analysis of the data from RAD and the two experiments is conducted, demonstrating minimal matching of reactions (12.5%) in the RAD and the experiments, with a higher percentage of matching reactions in the directed and free experiments (56.6%). The reactions to the stimulus “Great Patriotic War” obtained as a result of the experiment are semantically grouped, and their further interpretation represents a fragment of the young Russian's language consciousness regarding the events of the Great Patriotic War. Thus, semantic analysis allows us to distribute the received reactions into several semantic groups: evaluation of the events of the past; WWII as part of family history; WWII as the distant past; WWII as a reason for pride; WWII as a joint social phenomenon in the cultural context; the events and realities of that war.

The article examines the existing approaches to the study of the individual style of the writer. We call these approaches models of individual style. We distinguish lexical model, syntactical model, narrative model and the model of intertextual relations. Specific features of the lexical model consist of the frequency distribution of certain words in text formation. The frequency distribution of lexical items reflects the importance of certain meanings and conceptual areas for a given author. The syntactic model of individual style is based on identifying characteristic syntactic constructions that have a high frequency rank for a particular author. The narrative model characterizes the way the story is organized. The units of the narrative model are the components of the plot and the operations that are performed on these components (moving, eliminating fragments of the narrative, combining episodes and scenes, introducing some components of the plot into others). Intertextual relations, that is, a set of semantic and formal references to other texts of the same or other authors, form an intertextual model, which also is unique for every writer. The above mentioned models complement each other and, taken together, make it possible to describe the specific features of the unique speech practices of the writer. Models of individual style are illustrated by the examples from Dostoevsky’s works. Modern corpus data technologies make it possible to more strictly develop the models of individual style, enhancing their objectivity by the implementation of quantitative methods. This article is a part of a project, initiated by Yu.N. Karaulov and E.L. Ginzburg.

The article is devoted to the author’s phraseology of Dostoevsky, which characterizes him as an artist, a native speaker of the Russian language of his time and can distinguish him from other authors. Identification and characterization of the author’s phraseological units and author’s techniques of their creation on the example of the description of phraseological units to talk about the language creative personality and the features of the idiostyle. The systemic feature of the writer’s idiostyle when describing phraseology is an extraordinary variety in form, semantic shades and references to precedent texts, as well as a special property of the writer’s language - universality and originality, which allows you to go beyond the time frame of the writer’s work. The phraseological units introduced by Dostoevsky in the middle and second half of the XIX century entered the Russian language, they are recognizable and somehow present in the language of the XX and XXI centuries. To become stable expressions, it takes time for a more complete mastering of Dostoevsky’s texts, reproduction and consolidation of phraseological units in the language. Paradoxically, the unique, multidimensional and inimitable idiostyle of the writer can become an obstacle to entering the language. Moving on from century to century accumulate idioms of the language, and therefore people’s memory. The description of Dostoevsky’s phraseological units makes it possible to compare both different works of one writer and works of different authors in the synchrony and diachrony of the Russian language.

The paper is dedicated to the analysis of irregular intensifying constructions in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s individual style, more specifically of irregular lexical combinations including an intensifier and a main word. The meaning of intensifies is completely focused on expressing the intensity of an attribute, action or state denominated by the main word. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing style tends to form certain types of irregular lexical combinations including intensifiers. Through a case study of intensifiers ochen’ , goryachii / goryacho , izo vsekh sil , etc. the article describes several main types of irregular combinations with the view to find out semantic effects of irregular combinability. The analysis has covered the complete corpus of Fyodor Doestoevsky’s texts (fiction, journalism, private correspondence, business correspondence and documents). The first discriminant mark of irregular combinations is the semantic contradiction between the terms, the violation of idiomatic compatibility rules is the second feature taken into account. Whereas collocational rules in modern Russian differ a lot from the language norms of the 19th century, the subcorpus of 19th century texts of the National Russian Corpus serves to test the irregular idiomatic combinability. The article shows how the irregular combinability causes context meaning shifts profiling peripheral semantic features of the main word or “imposing” on it an untypical and contradictory semantics. In irregular lexical combinations, the language representation changes due to the original authors reinterpretation of the referential situation. The irregular lexical combinations with intensifiers are thereafter a distinctive feature of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s individual writing style that reveals his original conceptualization of the world.

The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that, although the interaction of history, culture and language is constantly in the field of view of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language, it has not yet received a complete analysis in detail, in particular, when describing the language pictures of different countries. The aim of the work is to prove that the semantics of the words of nominating titles of the English nobility of the Victorian era has not changed. The materials for the work were modern and classical, starting from the XIX century, word usage from the English language, contained in modern media texts from Internet sources, as well as the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century. At least 2000 such word usages were analyzed using the method of etymological analysis, the method of semantic analysis and the method of functional analysis, which allowed us to obtain a reliable picture of their functioning. The triple union of history, culture and language in the approach to the study of linguistic pictures of different countries is at the center of research in recent years. The interaction of these phenomena has become the subject of close attention in many articles and dissertations of linguists, historians, linguoculturologists, as well as all those who study the evolution of a particular language. Lexemes denoting the noble status of a person are important concepts of the British national linguistic picture of the world and culture. The semantics of lexemes was studied according to lexicographic sources. The sources of examples of contextual use were the texts of novels by English writers of the late XIX century and modern English-language texts of the Internet: online versions of newspapers, advertising texts, blogs. To achieve the goal of our research, the article uses such methods as the method of continuous sampling, the method of lexicographic description, the comparative method, the statistical method, and a number of others.

Case Theory interacts with Government Theory in its operation and so, cases are assigned to the complements of governors. Case assigners are the governors of their dependent clauses while the case receivers are the governed NPs. So, the purpose of the study is to survey case assignment in Fulfulde generally by identifying and analysing the elements of Fulfulde structures and their relationship in terms of structural case. Unstructured observation was the method used for eliciting data for this study. Adequate and natural data were recorded and analysed sentence by sentence, the way they were uttered by the native speakers. The Theoretical Framework adopted for data analysis by this study is Principle and Parameters Theory. The study discovered that in Government, apart from (V)erbs, (P)repositions and tensed INFL, (N)ouns, (A)djectives and Focus Markers FMs can also govern and assign case to their complements in Fulfulde. The study has proved that in Fulfulde, cases can be assigned either to the left or to the right, depending on the relation.