Vol 14, No 3 (2023): LINGUOCOGNITIVE AND LINGUOCULTURAL MODELLING OF TEXT AND DISCOURSE

-

The subject of the study is the concept of “politeness” in business communication, its lexical and grammatical ways//means of expression in Russian. Particular attention is paid to the social relationship between interlocutors in a communicative situation. The purpose of the study is to describe the concept of “politeness” and identify its linguocultural features. In accordance with the purpose and objectives of the study, the paper analyzes the features of the implementation of the concept of “politeness” in the system of language functions and considers the strategies of positive and negative politeness in speech behavior in the field of business communication. Based on the analysis of the content of the main functions of language, it was concluded that the category of politeness is realized within the framework of the communicative function of language; The study analyzed the strategies of positive and negative politeness and the peculiarities of its implementation within the framework of private//specific individual communicative functions that correspond to various areas of communication. As a result of the analysis of speech behavior strategies in accordance with the rules of politeness, it was concluded that politeness is an important component of business communication, and speech behavior strategies are based on the difference in the cultural values of a particular society and depend on the models of social behavior adopted in it. If the lines of behavior underlying the first of them are associated with the involvement of the interlocutor in the conversation, paying attention to him, then the second strategy contains lines of behavior associated with the provision of freedom to the interlocutor.

The study is devoted to the actualization of the ideas of the great comparative scholar of the XIXth century Max Müller (1823-1900), a contemporary of A. Schleicher, who, as is traditionally believed, worked mainly in the naturalistic trend. The authors of the study show that the achievements of M. Müller were unreasonably underestimated, calling the scientist a popularizer of science. The victory of positivism in German linguistics weakened interest in the works by M. Müller: linguistics was no longer perceived as a natural science. It is noted that the positivist approach denied the “metaphysical” typology, close in spirit to M. Müller. The authors come to the conclusion that M. Müller’s ideas and methodological attitudes survived his time into the future and sound relevant in the humanities of the XXIst century, based on the anthropological understanding of linguistic phenomena. M. Müller was one of the first scholars to distinguish between philology and linguistics, he boldly extrapolated the attitudes of comparative studies to other areas of humanitarian knowledge - mythology, religion, innovatively applied a socio-cultural approach to the analysis of language features and the study of archaic texts. The study compares M. Müller’s ideas with traditional historical observations of national comparativist- and-historical observations of Russian comparativists - F.I. Buslaev and I.I. Sreznevsky. It is emphasized that his works reveal the connection of philosophy with private sciences: linguistics, theology, cultural history. In this sense, “The Science of Language” can be regarded as an original experience of creating philological hermeneutics. It is stated that M. Müller studied the historical space of language from the point of view relevant to the modern science of comparative semasiology. The refraction of his ideas is observed in the works of modern scientists - typologists, comparativists, conceptologists: V.A. Dybo, V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov, Yu.S. Stepanov. Once again, the naturalistic approach is reaching a new level of development in the XXIst century, and the comparative method - the main research tool of M. Müller and other scientists of the Schleicher era - is being actualized not only in linguistics, but also in philology, history of religion and ethnology. The dialectical approach to typological linguistics applied by M. Müller, remains in demand by the science of modern times.

Lyudmila Georgievna Zubkova was a professor, Doctor of Philology, famous Russian linguist, author of more than 100 works on general and comparative historical linguistics, philosophy and theory of language, history of linguistics, methodology of linguistics, phonology, morphonology, morphology of the Russian language, linguistic semantics and semiotics. She supervised more than 20 candidates of philological sciences. L.G. Zubkova worked at Peoples’ Friendship University named after Patrice Lumumba (1960-2002), taught at Lomonosov Moscow State University and was a professor of the Department of Russian Language and General Linguistics at Moscow State Pedagogical University (2002-2021). The study gives a review of the most significant stages of professor L.G. Zubkova’s scientific activity and her scientific heritage.

The research field of geopoetics as the theory of studying creative forms and ways of human interaction with the geographic space, the multidimensional concept shaped by the syncretic perception of reality, is expanding dynamically in the aspect of space interpretation and modeling. Such research prism facilitates addressing projective meanings of the modeled reality, studying geopoetic image as a cultural sign, process and result of aesthetic display and representation of reality. Taking into account the relevance of the problem, the authors of the article set a goal to investigate the semiotic triad of St. Petersburg, the emotional component of the axiological model and its semantic transformations: Petropol’ - Petrograd - Leningrad, that permits to present a multilateral description of geopoetic image modifications. The research logic is dictated by the fact that the conceptualization of space in its various manifestations is associated with the study of the territory as an object of aesthetic reflection. The study analyzes creative embodiment of a particular toponym in its dual rational and emotional essence as a fact of verbal art. Transformation and treatment of geopoetic image meanings of St. Petersburg based on the spheres of urban semiotics are analyzed in the aspect of giving new meanings and semantics to the place in the context of spatial and cultural historical relations and models. The authors argue that geopoetic image is a special representation of geographical space in its historical and cultural, value and semantic nature and fusion in their unity. The existing territory can be presented as a compact axiological model through the “prism” of socio-cultural values, signs and symbols. Actualization of the palimpsest concept based on the combination of textual layers, research of peculiarities of structural meaning modeling enable addressing the reconstruction of the semiotic system and variant semantics of “city mirror” texts.

Structural and semantic linguistics has accumulated colossal experience in the systematization of language units, the relationships between them, has formed a unified view of the language as a complex system. Cognitive and discursive paradigm in linguistics has made it possible to explain linguistic and speech characteristics with the context and attracted the cognitive nature of the linguistic sign as a full-fledged component of analysis. Transferring the idea of anthropocentrism to the figure of the second participant in communication, it came to the conclusion that the last component plays large role in the communicative interaction between addresser - text - addressee, and that the interpretive potential of the text depends on the cognitive abilities of this addressee and his discursive baggage. In the/given article the listed characteristics of the state of modern linguistics made it possible to try to identify an interdependent relationship between the structural and semantic characteristics of language units selected by the author of a literary text from the arsenal of the language and woven into its syntagmatics, and the cognitive and discursive «subtext» that linguistics extracts from the text, which helps expose the author’s intentions more clearly. The material for the analysis made fragments of works by the classical Russian literature authors (I.A. Bunin, I.A. Goncharov, M.M. Prishvin, A.P. Chekhov), structural and semantic analysis was used as a leading method, supplemented with elements of content and discourse analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the desire to make a linguistic analysis of the speech canvas of a literary text in the context of new explanatory «horizons» that have opened up due to the cognitive-discursive paradigm. The study of the linguistic «details» of specific fragments of literary texts has shown that the interpretation of a literary text is based on the characteristics of linguistic units (morphemes, words, word forms, syntactic constructions, CSI, etc.) described in detail within the framework of the structural and semantic paradigm, expanding the view of the contextual environment (in this case - already broad context) allows introduce into the interpretation arguments that depend on the interpreter’s own reading and within his value system.

Currently, the study of victimization and victim behavior as phenomena of modern cyberspace in the aspect of their stereotyping in the language consciousness of young people is a topical problem due to some extralinguistic reasons, such as massive involvement of young people in virtual communication, anonymity of cybercommunication and lack of legal liability for deviant behavior on the Internet, people’s ignorance of the need to correctly configure the privacy settings of their personal accounts, etc. This research is aimed at revealing the stereotypical representation of a cybervictim in the language consciousness of Russian students. The novelty of the phenomenon of cybercommunication and the insufficient scientific research data within the framework of psycholinguistics indicate the theoretical and practical significance of such studies. To solve the tasks set, the chain associative experiment in the form of an online questionnaire was conducted among students of all educational specializations of Kemerovo State University. The study of the respondents’ associative reactions with the use of methods of morphosyntactic analysis and semantic gestalt analysis made it possible to identify the semantic domains, on the basis of which the associative field was modeled, which characterizes the stereotypical representation of a cybervictim in the linguistic consciousness of Russian students. The results allow the authors to conclude that, from the viewpoint of young people, a cybervictim as a participant in the Internet communication does not evoke associations related to nationality, sex, age, profession. With a generally positive attitude to a cybervictim arousing sympathy, respondents point out the inability of such a person to take actions, which makes it possible to interpret the stereotypical image of a cybervictim as of a person without their own life philosophy or unable to defend it for physiological or psychological reasons, that negates the possibility to influence the communicative situation of this type.

The author presents the arguments for the defining role of linguocultural studies at the present stage of the development of linguistics. It is noted that linguistics continues its search for the space of language studies in the light of integral human knowledge. Whereas structural approach views any language as an autonomous semiotic formation, “self-enclosed and self-supported”, as a rule, without taking into account extralinguistic aspects, which are studied in the framework of other humanities, anthropological approach is based on understanding language as a constitutive human property, as a part of humans’ daily living activities and their spiritual life. Linguistics has reached the point of studying language as an anthropological phenomenon and at this point solely linguistic analysis is not enough as it is insufficient to rely just on the traditional pattern including linguistics plus deep introspection or accidental, non-systematic knowledge taken from various humanities and sciences. It is suggested that anthropological “twist” in linguistics will let us overcome the long-running stage of spontaneous connection of the existing and potential linguistics. The article highlights the process of differentiation of linguistic approaches existing on the neighboring, but not identical, scientific platforms. At the same time the research conducted reveals the trend towards their convergence in the framework of the unified linguo-anthropological methodology. It is claimed that the defining role in this process belongs to linguocultural studies. The study deals with the basic principles of linguocultural approach. Various signs such as words, phraseological units and even the signs of the text size are used to identify the points of convergence between so similar, though not identical, branches - linguocultural studies and ethnolinguistics. The processes of interaction of mental structures and the language forms of their representation are explicated. Culturally marked signals in the semantics of language signs are identified and described.

The present study deals with the topical issue of professional public relations (PR) terminology translation into the Russian language. The discipline and the field of professional activity, which emerged in Russia in the late 1980s, still poses lots of problems in terms of translation. The aim of the study is to reveal what translation procedures are applicable in rendering subject specific terminology into the target language with the absence of equivalents in the professional field. The novelty lies in the disclosure of translation features as well as translation procedures applied to PR terminology with special attention to linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The methods of comprehensive analysis of English PR terms, comprising the general scientific method, the communicative method, the method of comparative analysis, the dictionary definitions method, as well as the method of translation adequacy and the method of analysis of translation procedures and transformations have allowed to reveal the peculiarities of PR terms’ meanings and their functioning in the English professional discourse to be rendered into the Russian language. The findings illustrate the most adequate procedures to be used for the purpose of rendering PR terms and terminology as units of specific meaning into the target language. The conclusion drawn from the study postulates that along with the borrowing of PR terminological field, the English cultural and conceptual worldview was also adopted to produce a hybrid professional worldview sharing similar PR subject specific language units, which is a great advance towards English as a global language.

The study is devoted to the description of the linguopragmatic potential of media texts in the context of the informational and psychological impact on the individual and collective addressee of mass information broadcasting. As the key modern form of text existence in the information space, a media text contains not only verbal elements that influence the audience through either spoken or written words, but also non-verbal ones, introduced through video, picture and various sound means other than speech. The combined combination of communicative means of linguistic and non-linguistic nature enhances the information-psychological impact on the audience by achieving a synergistic effect. Due to the fact that with the complex use of verbal and non-verbal means, the media text acquires such essential characteristics as polycode and multimodality, its analysis should take into account not only the linguistic proper, but also the extralinguistic aspects of communication. Modern media text has a complex communicative structure that combines a text, hypertext, dynamic (static) image and sound, and provides a non-linear, multi-channel, multi-layered and multidimensional perception of the embedded conceptual and stylistic meanings. The aim of the study is to analyze linguopragmatic characteristics of a media text as the primary form of the informational and psychological impact realization in the modern mass media discourse. Descriptive, synchronic, diachronic and functional methods of research, as well as methods of contextual and communicative-pragmatic analysis have been employed. As to the material, the study is based on the analysis of theoretical works by Russian and foreign linguists for the past 30 years. The authors concluded that the information-psychological impact is enhanced by the use of PR and advertising techniques in the media text and is largely based on their application.

The linguoculturological studies in paremiology make one of the most actively developing, researchers have repeatedly analyzed the concepts of GOOD and EVIL on the material of paremias of a particular language. However, the study of character traits «good» and «evil» on the basis of the proverbs of the Russian and Chinese languages has not yet been considered, which is the novelty of this study. The article studies paremiological units of the Russian and Chinese languages, representing a good and evil person. The goal of the work is to identify common and peculiar ethno-specific features reflected in the proverbs of the Russian language against the background of their counterparts in the Chinese language, as well as to establish their motivation. To achieve this goal, methods of comparative and linguoculturological analyses were applied. The sources of the material were the proverbs dictionary, as well as data from Russian and Chinese corpora. The paper concludes that there are much more different cultural attitudes contained in the proverbs we are interested in than common ones, which causes a big difference in understanding the character traits of «good» and «evil» between native Russian and Chinese speakers. Understanding the universal and nationally marked ideas of Russians and Chinese effectively contributes to cultural communication between peoples.

Toponyms of the Sultanate of Oman so far have not been studied in Russian linguistics in general, and in Russian Arabic studies, in particular. Due to the fact that in Oman there is a specific landscape and peculiar material culture, and the local variation of the Arabic language is characterized by multi-level dialectal peculiarities, the authors assumed that the toponyms of this country should demonstrate certain trends in the place names formation against the backdrop of the common Arabic toponymy. The object of the research is a wide range of toponyms of the Sultanate of Oman - from the names of the largest locations to the ones which are less significant in historical and economic terms, but are of interest from the viewpoint of the linguistic material analysis. The authors examined a large sample of toponyms of various categories, above all, oeconyms and hydronyms; due to the local natural conditions, their share in the country’s toponymy is very significant. The article is aimed at highlighting both the universal, pan-Arabic features and solely the Omani ones in the semantics and algorithms of toponymic word-building of the country. The main local toponyms were considered in terms of their origin, etymology, frequency of formants, morphological composition, as well as in relation to certain semantic fields. This made it possible to systematize the toponyms of Oman and draw a number of conclusions regarding the historically conditioned absence of loan words among Omani toponyms, their complexity with the predominance of specific lexemes characterizing the local landscape, the inclusion of Omani toponyms in lexical groups related to water, as well as the nationally-oriented world picture reflected in characteristics-indices of similar objects of Omani geography. To this end, the researchers used data from subsidiary and related humanitarian areas - geography, history, sociology, ethnopsychology. The work contributes to the study of the semantics of toponyms, comparative toponymy, Arabic lexicology, Russian Arabic studies as well as regional studies.

The purpose of this article is to identify and describe the two main genre varieties of the modern Russian Kazakh story. In the course of the study, the following methods were used: theoretical, historical-literary, system-typological approach, poetic-structural analysis of the work. In Russian Kazakh literature, realism and postmodernism are developing in parallel. The story of Nikolai Verevochkin “Singing in the transitions” is a realistic work. Its artistic world contains an image of a system of literary heroes based on determinism, the conditionality of the formation and development of a person’s character by various factors. Determinism contains the strong connection of the structural elements of the story. Verevochkin gradually reveals the characters of the heroes in various situations. The problematics of the story also has a traditional character for the literature of realism. The author demonstrates commitment to humanism, which is the ideological basis of realism. The article also analyzes the work of postmodernism - the story of Asel Omar “Alphabet”. The definition of “story-lexicon”, introduced by the author of the article, reflects the genre and generic features of this work. The story-lexicon Asel Omar consists of micro-novellas, which at the same time are dictionary entries. The peculiarity of these articles is that they are based on a certain storyline. The micronovelas are arranged in alphabetical order, which gave the author of this article reason to call them dictionary entries. Asel Omar’s lexicon story, in contrast to Nikolai Verevochkin’s story, is written in a freer plot form. The application of the essay principle allowed the author to create a reasoning story. The main thing for Assel Omar is to express her thoughts on various topics. The work of Nikolai Verevochkin is a narrative story. Thus, in modern Russian Kazakh prose, two main types of story are presented - realistic and postmodern story. Due to historical and cultural reasons, the realistic story prevails. The work of Asel Omar “Alphabet” is a unique example of a postmodern story-lexicon in modern Kazakh literature.

According to the classification of speech strategies by O.S. Issers, semantic, lexicogrammatical, and pragmatic indicators act as linguistic indicators of speech strategies. The article is devoted to the analysis of the most significant linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of speech strategies that are used to create the image of the President of Egypt Abdel Fattah Khalil El-Sisi in the movie series “٣ اختيار ” (The Choice 3). These strategies were considered as part of the analysis of the Arabic polycode text, which is presented as the integrity of verbal and non-verbal components. The material of the study was the communicative acts of the main characters and the video sequence of the analyzed series, in which the authors recreated the revolutionary era of Egypt in 2013. The novelty of the study is an attempt to characterize Arabic political discourse as an independent linguistic phenomenon. As a result of the study, the authors arrive at the conclusion that the creation of the image of a politician requires such semantic indicators of speech strategy as: submission, threat, discrediting; lexico-grammatical indicators: syntactic synonyms of various types, paremiae, dialectal forms. The effect of applying these communication strategies, which create the image of the Egyptian president, is enhanced by extralinguistic parameters and symbols studied within the theory of the polycode text. The analysis of the interaction of codes of various genres of the polycode text in the Arabic political discourse is of interest for further research.