Linguistics

The Spanish King’s Christmas message is a traditional event of the social and political life in Spain, and it is one of the few occasions when the head of state directly addresses the nation. This annual address is structured according to strict traditions of classical rhetoric, it has its own language and composition features and has a symbolic and ritual nature. This article analyzes Felipe VI’s Christmas messages (from 2014 to 2018) and focuses on the constructed images of the Spanish monarch (addresser), the Spanish nation (addressee) and the country.

The article focuses on the special features of fantasy literature and points out the difficulties of translating the texts of such genre. The comparative analysis of people’s names’ translation is implemented on the example of two variants of translation of one literary work. The article also introduces the frequency statistics of translation strategies, techniques and transformations used to transfer the author’s magic worldview into its translation counterpart.

The research aims at studying holophrastic constructions of James Joyce, the role of such technique in the writer’s language play. Some aspects of their creation and functioning in the text are analyzed, along with the possibilities of their translation on the example of four translations of Finnegan’s Wake into Russian (A. Rene, A. Volokhonskiy), into German (D. Stündel) and Spanish (M. Zabaloi).

The article analyses G. Ivanov’s memoire prose created in emigration (Winters in St. Petersburg, Chinese Shadows, sketches and essays) from the perspective of communicative strategies and tactics of depicting the Soviet reality. The author takes into account the fact that due to the multi-layered genre nature of the memoires the strategies can be of two types – behavioral and speech ones. The former strategies are related to the plot collisions, the latter – to the linguistic means of their representation. Each strategy is actualized through a set of speech tactics.

The article considers the structural characteristics of V. V. Putin’s response utterances in the course of a public dialogue. The interrelation is discovered between the object of criticism in the question of the media representative and the choice of speech tactics and language means of their manifestation in the answer of the head of state. The identified features are presented in the form of compositional patterns.

The article analyzes the functioning of metaphors and idioms in modern newspaper political texts; speech errors in the use of these expressive means in the speech of authors and heroes of publications (journalists, politicians, political scientists, etc.) are revealed. The main types of such defects, as well as linguistic and cognitive reasons for their occurrence are established.

The article discusses the lexical originality of youth slang in the language of social networks on the example of the messages of students of a provincial school of higher education; an attempt was made to organize lexical units according to the sphere of use; units that have changed or expanded their semantics in the communication of modern youth are highlighted.

The article discusses structural and functional differences between the medical discourses that are used in professional and non-professional settings. Having analyzed over 51,000 word usages, the authors conclude that the most significant differences are: the organization of the synonymous sets of the hyperonym ‘Disease’, the design of paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections, and the application of slang words and expressions.

The article considers abbreviations as key elements of social and cultural space in the language of mass media. The paper closely focuses on the following language units as the initial lexemes: IGIL (ISIS), WADA, SMI (mass media), OPEC etc. The author shows that abbreviated names reflect currently relevant phenomena in the life of the Russian society, and perform an expressive and influencing function.

This article presents a comprehensive cognitive-oriented study of the concept ‘Pioneer’ in the linguistic picture of the world of the representatives of the Russian culture. The analysis of various lexicographic sources allowed the author to identify a generalized prototype of the concept and obligatory characteristics that reflect its value-based evaluative perception.