Publications

This paper introduces a paired text history methodology to explore the citation practices of three experienced Russian scholars in philosophy, sociology, and economics. The empirical focus is on the analysis of three paired text histories, comparing Russian-medium research articles with English-medium research articles in each discipline. By analyzing the paired text histories through the use of multiple data sources—article drafts, email correspondence surrounding text production, and interviews—focusing specifically on the changes made to citations in each pair, the paper seeks to throw light on both micro and macro level knowledge production practices. At the micro level, the paper analyses changes made to citations across English and Russian-medium texts, documenting the involvement of literacy brokers, their evaluative requests about citations, and authors’ responses to such requests. At the macro level, the paper raises questions about what counts as ‘citeworthy’ in different geolinguistic contexts and considers the consequences of citation brokering and citation practices for knowledge production and circulation globally.

In the present paper, I analyze peculiarities of legend collections in European literature of the mid-19th century, taking into consideration their Swiss, Spanish and Belgian variants. Starting with the history of the legend in European literature, I compare three volumes of legends – Sieben Legenden by Keller, Leyendas by Bécquer,Légendes flamandes by De Coster. What is being dwelt upon are  their attitude to the source (pre-text), conflict, composition, setting, personage type. The conclusion is made that the three collections are similar in their authors’ understanding of the legend, which is presented as a tale that depicts a conflict between a person and some established set of values. In Sieben Legenden this set of values is given as most natural for people and despised by the official religion. The protagonists go through a series of trials to return to the harmonious family. In Leyendas the established order is mainly embodied into an old tradition or superstition, which the protagonist tries to ignore, with a fatal outcome. In Légendes flamandes the protagonist may disregard some ethical or moral concepts, only to happily understand their mistake later on. Though all the books appeared in the time of the late Romanticism in non-dominant European cultures, they present different sides of Romantic philosophy: romantic irony (Keller), love to the supernatural (Bécquer), attitude to history (De Coster).

The study guide “Towards Improved Academic Writing Skills” is aimed to refine student academic writing skills and to facilitate the teaching process within the discipline Academic Writing in English. 12 units constitute the contents of the book, which embrace the issues related to differences between academic and non-academic styles, peculiarities of APA style, conciseness and wordiness, an effective use of academic word lists by Averil Coxhead (AWL). Additionally, all sections of a research proposal are considered in terms of their logical structure and relevant academic vocabulary. Each of the book’s chapter enables an analysis of authentic student writing performance with regard to the issue under consideration. The book is supplemented with a glossary of academic writing terms, posters and other helpful appendices. The publication  is intended for English teachers and undergraduates.

The coursebook is designed for university undergraduate students (BA) whose major is History or whose interest lies in history, both as an academic discipline and a professional field. It is designed to develop professional intercultural communicative competence of students who have attained B1-B2 level according to the CEFR global scale of English language proficiency. The coursebook applies a profession-oriented approach in foreign language teaching and is aimed at developing students' ability to use English as a tool for solving problem-based tasks of the broad context of the academic and future professional activities of historians. Engagement in solving profession-oriented project cases integrated into each module, develops such transferable and professional skills of students as searching, analysing, evaluating and interpreting various types of sources – authentic texts, audio and video materials, ensuring the development of receptive and productive types of speech activity. A major portion of each module is dedicated to the development of ‘learner autonomy’ and the ability of students to create their own personally meaningful information products of various genres and styles required in academic and professional activities of a historian, e.g.: a motivation letter, a concept paper for a project, a short article, a historiographic essay, debates, interviews, podcasts, etc.

The coursebook meets the requirements of the latest Federal State Educational Standards (Russia).

The article explores linguacultural characteristics of Petersburg in J. Coetzee’s English-language novel "The Master of Petersburg", the postmodern biography of the outstanding Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky. For creating verisimilitude of his bio-fictional narration, the author skillfully constructs the external linguacultural context with the help of linguistic markers of Russian cultural text localization. However, the English author does not seek to create an actual representation of Petersburg, fulfilling the city space with fictional urban objects. This intentional play with the semantic correlation between reality and fiction provokes bilingual readers, acquainted with the toponymy of the Russian city, to suffer from cognitive dissonance.

The report is devoted to the linguoculturological characteristics of the image of St. Petersburg in M. Bradbury's biofictional novel "To the Hermitage". When modeling the Russian cultural space of St. Petersburg, the author refers to the St. Petersburg's text, actively using the “local” St. Petersburg's vocabulary, and to create a Russian cultural context, M. Bradbury uses a variety of Russianisms that actualize the Russian discourse of various periods of Russian history.

The article challenges the traditional theory according to which only transitive verbs can have passive voice forms in Russian. Based on the Russian National Corpus and texts found on the Internet, the paper shows that the grammatical system of Russian permits the passivization of oblique-complement verbs and verbs that govern prepositional phrases. The analysis shows that whether or not a verb permits the formation of passive voice forms depends on the communicative status of the complement rather than its grammatical form, while the semantic and morphonological restrictions on passivization equally apply to verbs regardless of the form of their complements. The paper gives evidence confirming that some passive voice forms are loan translations from other languages, but argues that the use of the loan translation mechanism does not bring about anything that contradicts the rules of Russian grammar, but rather leads to a more comprehensive implementation of previously unused capabilities of the grammatical system.

The study focuses on 56 English and German nominative-communicative (verbal) phraseological units, with the common etymologically related component feather/Feder as part of their composition. Totally, classified in 3 groups, 10 units out of 56 are determined as cross-lingual equivalents (CLE):  full CLE (2), close CLE (6), quasi-equivalents (2). Overall, the analysis of the selected sampling of idioms demonstrates their high-level figurativeness due to the symbolic nature of the common component and its figurative potential, embodied in unique national images.

In learning, students learn through interaction with the teacher, the other students, and with the study material, to build language skills. What happens interaction opportunities and limitations when learning goes online? In an online classroom, collaboration is difficult to achieve due to lack of physical proximity between the participants. The paper explores the problem of online collaboration between teachers and students in English as foreign language (EFL) classroom with the empirical focus on the role video cameras play in online collaboration. We argue that cameras, although being contested as a pedagogical tool, should be seen as an important ‘proximity tool’ that helps foster collaboration by bringing learners and teachers ‘closer’. We theorize ‘collaboration’ via social constructivism lens and argue that collaboration as being ‘close’ echoes in the digital sense with ‘being with’ (Nancy, 2000) and is core for developing an ecology of virtual collaboration.

We draw on the online survey data from foreign language students and language instructors in one Russian research-intensive university about how they use cameras online. Quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis are used to identify key patterns and emerging themes. The key findings of the study are that 1) cameras is an important aspect of fostering collaboration online, 2) there is a tension in relationships among students, teachers, and study materials, 3) students and teachers differently perceive the need to use cameras which may limit opportunities for online collaboration. The paper concludes with a discussion of how camera use can foster online collaboration between teachers and students.

A growing strand of work in ERPP (English for research publication purposes) explores how English is nested within research evaluation regimes in non-Anglophone contexts across the world. This paper focuses on the under-researched context of Russia, where language of research publication is at the heart of tensions in institutional, national and international research evaluation regimes: between Russian, which until the 1970s was the second-most used language in the world’s total scientific output, and English, the dominant language of global evaluation indexes.

The paper uses documentary sources to outline recent structural transformations in Russian academia, including the relatively recent insertion of English into evaluation systems. It draws on an interview-based study to explore how 16 scholars in one research-intensive university are navigating such changes in their publication practices, in three disciplines: economics, sociology and philosophy. Key findings highlight: 1) scholars’ languages of publication; 2) the challenging material conditions shaping scholars’ opportunities for research writing; 3) the pressures to publish in English alongside Russian; 4) the ways in which language choice is refracted through geohistorical ‘disciplinary conversations’ traditions; 5) the challenges of navigating different discourse communities. The value of such studies for ERPP within EAP as a field is underlined.

The article describes an improved paired comparison method, which systematizes in tables the rules of logical conclusions and formulas of checking indices for comparison of technical systems. To achieve this goal, the authors formulate rational rules of logical conclusions in making a paired comparison of the systems. In addition, for the purpose of consistency check of the results of the assessment, the authors introduce parameters such as «the number of scores gained by one system» and «systems’ quality index»; moreover, they design corresponding calculation formulas. For the purposes of practical application of this method to design computer programs, the authors propose to use formalized variants of interconnected tables: a table for processing and systematization of expert information, a table of possible logical conclusions based on the results of comparison of a set number of technical systems and a table of check values in the paired comparison method used in quality assessment of a definite number of technical systems. These tables allow one to organize procedures of the information processing in a more rational way and to predominantly exclude the influence of mistakes on the results of quality assessment of technical systems at the stage of data input. The main positive effect from the implementation of the paired comparison method is observed in a considerable reduction of time and resources needed to organize experts work, process expert information, and to prepare and conduct distant interviews with experts (on the Internet or a local computer network of an organization). This effect is achieved by a rational use of input data of the quality of the systems to be assessed. The proposed method is applied to computer programs used in assessing the effectiveness and stability of large technical systems.

Genre analysis involves at least a ‘foray’ into the social/contextual dimension framing genre-exemplars. One way to explore this dimension is drawing on the concept of metapragmatics, which is primarily associated with (American) linguistic anthropology. However, with a few exceptions, genre studies have not consistently operationalized metapragmatics, either theoretically or practically. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to explore one possible angle of such operationalization by means of studying discourse fragments reflecting on fragments of (these very or other) discourses (so-called metapragmatic discourses) vis-à-vis any generic properties of the reflected discourse. Specifically, we analyzed comments sections for a number of YouTube videos exemplifying several lifestyle genres. The results indicate that generic references can range from simply using a generic label to refer to the discourse in question (as a token of a certain type/genre) to actually discussing the generic characteristics of the genre it instantiates, as well as projecting certain (generic) metapragmatic stances. Another observation is that different wordings used by the discourse community to refer to generic models can be, as it were, ‘proper’ generic labels, but they can also be words and phrases that would hardly qualify as proper names of genres from an analyst’s point of view. Both these ‘proper’ and other - ‘genre-like’ - labels are also often used in conjunction with or are replaced by other ways of metapragmatically referring to what the speaker ‘does’ or even what they ‘are’ in/by dint of using the discourse in question. This suggests that any generic labels or cues are just part of a large pool of other possible metapragmatic meanings, knowledge, and ideologies circulating in discourse communities. More broadly, the results may indicate that genre studies should see genre as an even less ‘stabilized’ entity because what a genre is depends on what people who actually use it ‘make of it’, as well as augment their standard toolkits with methods aimed at exploring metapragmatic discourse.

Fantasy and science fiction genres extensively use imaginary settings and locations different from realistic ones but striving to look real. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pioneers of the science fiction genre in Russia, actively exploited the potential of both genres in their early tale, Monday starts on Saturday (1964), which combines features of the two space types. The present paper analyses the principles of creating ‘mago-space’ in the book. To do so, we look at the spatial organization of the events involved in the plot and the personages’ ideas regarding space. The research will enable us to clarify the role of space in conveying the authors’ message, which in this tale is quite explicit. We argue that the space changes significantly within the book, accompanying genre transformations and the development of the protagonist. Since the tale uses ‘mental sublocations’ as the main units of spatial organization, each part is determined by a certain type of cultural heritage. In the first part, it is the mental space of folklore and classical literature, in the second – that of mythology and science fiction, and in the final – philosophy and science. Mental spaces that coexist and follow various laws form a narrative which turns out to be a journey to the described present in the variety of its forms.

The present paper deals with the interdiscursivity in postmodern literary biographic narration (biofiction) in which interdiscursivity is viewed as the author’s strategy of text formation. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the interest of modern linguistics in interaction of different discourse types in literary texts. It is also relevant to study different techniques that the English author uses to represent an external linguocultural context, namely, to create the image of a Russian city in the English-language narration. The novelty of the research is implied by the choice of material under examination, as the constitutive elements of biofictional narration have not been fully defined yet.Methodology and sources. The study is drawn on M. Bradbury’s English-language postmodern biofictional novel To the Hermitage. This biofiction depicts D. Diderot’s trip to St. Petersburg, where he was invited by Catherine the Great. It also recounts the adventures of a modern expedition, which came to the same destination to study the French philosopher’s heritage. The research of discourse interaction is based on a methodology, developed by V. Chernyavskaya. It combines traditional methods of stylistic analysis with discourse analysis.Results and discussion. While analysing the literary space of the biofiction, the following “central” discourses have been identified: Russian-culture-oriented discourse of English as well as historical, political, and autobiographical discourses. The narration is also rich in traits of “periphery” discourses, to name just a few: economical, literary, colloquial French, etc. M. Bradbury uses the strategy of simulated interdiscursivity to make a persuasive impact on a reader’s mind, at the same time involving the reader in fact-fiction semantic game.Conclusion. The analysis highlighted here proved the fact that interdiscursivity is one of the dominant mechanisms an author uses to construct biofictional narration. This strategy reflects some key features of postmodern texts, such as blending of literary genres, a playful montage of different discourse types and ironic mode of narration.

Our research examines the ways in which the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is manifested in postmodernist biographical discourse, which is viewed as an experimental form of literary texts. The paper also analyses inherent characteristics of biofictional discourse which provoke a reader's cognitive dissonance.

The article is a reflection of practice-related research that aimed at bringing together corpus linguistics tools and teaching in L2 classroom.  The focus throughout is on exploring the relationship between corpus analysis and language acquisition practice and how far the usage of corpus tools can provide  answers to the questions and issues that arise in practice of language teaching.

Structurally, the article gives a brief overview of corpora influence on language teaching over the recent decades, and then tries to elaborate on how it feeds into content selection, language teaching material as well as classroom techniques. Specifically, some attention is devoted to overwhelming contrast between spoken and written register, which was described by Biber et al [1999] as a result of a large-scale corpus-based analysis. The corpus study influences our understanding of both quantitative and qualitative implications for learner vocabulary, which are also discussed in the main body. In conclusion, we share some insights into how much corpus-based material is advisable to include as we develop our syllabi since we admit that it might be rather time-consuming to turn corpus examples into exercises and classroom activities.

The article states that the contribution of corpus research to understanding and describing the language we teach is hardly disputable. What is more, the superficial indication that a given course book has been corpus-informed is only the tip of the iceberg. As Scot and Tribble [2007] put it “the very foundations of Linguistics have been shaken; in some cases the movement of the

tectonic plates has thrust up new Himalayas where before there was apparently level ground.” [p. 4]. Thus, technological shift shook long held notions in language education, as  seemingly explicit grammar rules gave way to less explicable authentic usage with a view to understanding the English outside the classroom.

On the practical side, the paper presents a set of corpus–based tasks, follow-up activities and expected results. These aimed at awareness-raising to register differences and sociolinguistic implications of hedging; additional practice for grammar patterns and idioms is presented. Within corpus-based activities learners are also presented with some contrasting statistics for cohesive devices use based on native speaker and non-native speaker writing. As a way of concluding remark, we suggest that corpus be used as a reference tool together with grammar books and dictionaries by both teachers and learners.

One of the possible ways to explore contextualization is through external discourses referencing the pragmatics of the discourse in question. These are known as metapragmatic discourse. The purpose of this article is to theoretically integrate the concept of metapragmatics into genre analysis and apply metapragmatic tools to the analysis of specific genres. Five YouTube videos together with their accompanying comments exhibiting metapragmatic properties were analyzed. Methodologically, the analysis relies on the textually oriented content analysis. The results indicate that placing discourses nominally relying on one and the same generic form into a certain genre may be predicated on contextual variables that may have nothing to do with said form per se. These variables, however, may be verbalized by the original author and by their audience in the form of metapragmatic markers. This may mean that for the final addressee, the “effect” of the original discourse will depend on the attribution of this discourse, based on the metapragmatic markers, to one of the “competing” genre variations emerging, as it were, in an ongoing exchange between the author and his audience. A case in point are sponsored and “honest” review genres. A second observation resides in the realm of hybrid genres. An example here is integrating sponsored content into one of the “legitimate” lifestyle-genres (“hot tips”, vlog, etc.). A fraction of the discourse community seems to view this as delegitimizing the discourse and the genre in question, while others see it as an “unfortunate insert”, which does not, however, change the genre’s overall value. This leaves the question open whether such genres should be considered new and full-fledged genres, with sponsored content being one of their integral features.

The article examines the urbanonymic nominations of Hamburg (Germany) as an element of the supertext about the city. The author analyzes the knowledge and meanings represented in the nominations of urban space objects, determines their main structural and semantic types, substantiates their cultural and pragmatic value.

This article examines the range of problems and contradictions associated with the work of women in the interwar period on the example of agriculture. The level of women’s participation in interwar agriculture and regional models of women’s labor are analyzed. There are a number of contradictions, particularly with regard to the number of women employed in agriculture, regional differences in agricultural activities. The latter part deals with the issue of women’s wage rates in agriculture.