Publications

Настоящее учебное пособие предназначено для  обучения академическим навыкам письма и подготовки к сдаче международного экзамена IELTS по аспектy «Академическое письмо».  

Целью пособия является формирование и закрепление академических навыков, необходимых для создания  англоязычных текстов учебной и научной направленности на микро и макроуровнях. Пособие направлено  на формирование компетенций, необходимых для использования английского языка в учебной, научной, и профессиональной деятельности. Пособие включает разделы, посвященные особенностям написания параграфа, изучения структуры академического эссе, а также эссе формата международного экзамена IELTS.

Материал пособия рекомендуется использовать для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы  студентов. Пособие может быть полезно студентам преподавателям  вузов,  а также для всех желающих приобрести академические навыки письма на английском языке.

In the late 18th century the word “legenda” entered the Russian language, and several decades later it started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper analyses short prosaic texts written in the 1820-1830 with this label in their titles or subtitles. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether such texts followed a similar generic pattern. As the literary legend was a fully developed genre in the late 19th century Russian literature, the research will presumably enable us to trace the formation of the genre. I argue that the chosen texts share a network of constituent properties, which indicates their generic cognateness and allows the reader to attribute them as literary legends. Roughly, the Russian literary legend of the 1820-s1840-s may be characterized as a historical narrative relating some extraordinary, often criminal events. Though the audience is likely to disbelieve the story, the narrator finds it necessary to communicate it, as it contains an important truth or idea missing from conventional sources. Despite the similarity of the generic pattern, the genre had fuzzy boundaries in the first half of the 19th century, which is revealed in numerous title alterations, inconsistency in using cognate labels (skazanie, predanie, byl’), absence of legend cycles, and insufficient speculations on the genre. However, it can be concluded that the literary legend of the time was a grain from which the late 19th century genre developed. 

The paper gives an analysis of the metaphors of old age that are well-established in German culture. The aim of the study is an empirical analysis of how old age is represented in the German language, reflecting the attitudes of society to old age.

The material for the study was a selection of aphoristic and proverbal text fragments that include the lexeme Alter (hohes Alter).

The methodological basis of the study is the cognitive theory of metaphor of G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, who argue that metaphors are not limited to the sphere of language and that the processes of human thinking themselves are metaphorical.

The study also relies on  metaphorical modeling, a theory which makes it possible to identify a system of metaphorical models in the discourse of old age, reflecting the attitude of members of society towards this discourse and its participants, forming a linguistic picture of the world.

The analysis identified several metaphorical models;  the most popular is the time cycle model (daily cycle, annual cycle), which represent old age as the evening or autumn of life – the time to prepare for the end of the cycle: winter/night is the time of death, when all life in nature freezes, “falls asleep”.

Old age is personified as an evil tyrant, robbing an elderly person of external beauty, energy, sometimes even clarity of thoughts.

The natural metaphorical model proclaims the physical and mental functionality and attractiveness of old age: an old person is compared with natural phenomena (gray hair – foam after a big storm at sea).

The architectural model represents old age as a building (a prison with the semantics of involuntary alienation from life, limiting the possibilities of movement and communication) or as its element (a balcony, which makes it possible to see wide surroundings and to evaluate what is happening).

The semantics of metaphors include an emotional assessment of old age. The high degree of influence of the considered metaphors on the opinions and beliefs of society necessitate further study of the metaphors themselves and the discourses of their functioning.

The monograph is the result of the joint efforts of linguistic scientists working in different cities of our country and abroad. It presents the materials of a scientific discussion on the problem indicated in its title: rationality and emotionality of language and speech. The study of these areas relates to cardinal and quite popular linguistic problems, since they are associated with feelings and attitudes towards the addressee and subject of speech. But despite the good luck and achievements in the field of their study, there are still many gaps waiting to be filled with new research. Rethinking the well-known and repeatedly discussed linguistic material in this direction can therefore help to clarify information about it in the general linguistic plan.

This paper explores word frequency patterns when considering text length, authorship and random distortion of texts. Through a series of experiments, we determined an optimal text size, a phenomenon that was predicted by George Zipf, which sees a minimal discrepancy between calculated and observed frequencies. A graphic representation allowed a plausible explanation behind the existence of this phenomenon. Working on the assumption that distorted texts might disobey Zipf's Law, we explored correlations among frequencies and text entirety compared to text distortions. Results revealed the crucial role of text length for maintaining Zipfian distribution: randomly chosen sets of words and fragmentary texts of optimal size still obey Zipf's Law. Findings show that authorship manifests itself through the author constant, defined as the relative frequency of the most frequent words, which remains constant throughout the works of any given author, including randomly chosen text chunks and fragments of sentences of various sizes.

Introduction. The scientific work focuses on the linguistic concepts of terminology and a term system, provides the views of linguists on the definition and differentiation of these terms, explains the semantics of the word and the term, as well as the role of the cognitive approach in modern terminology. The scientific work defines a concept and a category, and describes the role of the processes of conceptualization and categorization in English terminology. As more than 90% of new words appearing in modern languages is vocabulary for special purposes, it is increasingly important to study the ways of their formation.

Methodology and sources. In light of the cognitive approach to understanding the semantics of words an emphasis should be based on anthropocentrist thinking, language picture of the world language and lexical-semantic variants of the word. The cognitive approach allows us to reveal the causes and mechanisms of dynamic processes in the field of professional nomination, taking into account the changing cognitive and communication needs of people. The research is made using corpora data.

Results and discussion. Cognitive categories are linked to conceptually defined prototypes that are crucial for the formation of categories. The central elements of prototypical categories make the category logical, understandable and convenient, since all members of the category meet a given list of characteristics.

Conclusion. The research is relevant since it provides a deeper understanding of the structure and content of concepts that underlie the formation of language categories, the mechanisms of interaction between cognitive and language structures in the process of forming the terminological meaning.

This paper considers verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Middle English concept dwelling. The authors posit that the characteristic features of the Medieval dwelling, as well as people’s conceptual vision of the world of physical reality are reflected in the language units employed to name these artifacts. The linguistic analyses of the concept manifestants are  performed within the framework of an interpretation field, which enables one to map the mental structure of this concept. At the same time, language means alone cannot be the only object of such concept studies: integrated analyses of lexical means together with such non-verbal phenomena as architectural monuments of the Medieval Britain between the 11th and 14th cc. BC, and other artifacts make it possible to build a more or less complete picture of the Medieval dwelling. Another key aspect of the question under discussion is the  assumption that there is a strong correlation between the appearance of a dwelling place and its structure/function on the development of the semantic structure of the Middle English polysemantic words associated with the medieval abode.

 

The chapter is devoted to the study of surrealist exhibitions and the collective creativity of surrealists.

The article is concerned with structural, cognitive, semantic, and cultural characteristics of English fabric names formed by means of deonymic derivation. The material under analysis consists of simple and composite lexical units which are derivatives from proper nouns referring to some onomastic realia in Great Britain and Northern Ireland . The corpus of deonymic fabric names was compiled by the authors from general and specialized dictionaries, as well as from websites of the UK textile companies. The analysis of reality-conventionality of relations between proper names and their derivatives resulted in dividing the researched fabric names into 2 groups: motivated nominations and relatively conventional symbols.

 

There has recently been a notable increase in the amount and perceived significance of new lifestyle media. Besides the instructive and entertaining function, these media arguably play a more fundamental sociocultural role of constructing identities. In consumer societies, these identities are to a great extent enacted through the acquisition of commodities and engagement in commodified practices, which thereby become semiotic resources of identity stylization. The purpose of this article is to explore the discursive mechanisms underpinning the process of formulating commodities and practices as such semiotic resources. To this end, several discourses from new online men’s magazines have been analyzed drawing on a model of discourse analysis that sees discourse as one of the “moments” of the social practice it is embedded in. The results indicate that the mechanism behind the processes in question can be described as a metasemiotic project. As such a project unfolds in discourse, various commodities and practices are being typified by a metasemiotic term. One of the most frequent prototypical metasemiotic terms in these resources is stylish man . The term is instantiated in texts by several lexemes, including the lexeme style and its derivatives, as well as lexemes naming various “masculine personas” such as man , guy, kid, gentleman, bad ass. It has been shown that an increasing number of commodities and practices are being “theorized” by the discourse of new online men’s magazines and typified by this term. One important feature behind the workings of the metasemiotic project is intertextuality. Specific texts are always dialogically linked to other texts of lifestyle discourse, while object-signs are reformulated and imbued with different social values. These results contribute to the exploration of contemporary lifestyle media and discursive mechanisms of identity construction used by them, and, in a more general sense, to recent discussions of operationalizing wider sociocultural context in textually oriented discourse analysis.

In our study we address the problem of how to study socially bound aspects of a written text production and make an attempt to explore non-discursive aspects of research proposal genre production. We explore how Russian students produce an English-medium research proposal text in social sciences and humanities and raise the following empirical research questions:

What resources are important for research proposal production and do students have access to them? What literacy brokers influence text production and why? How do students perceive the research proposal genre and what values influence their writing practices?

The article is devoted to the problems of developing of extensive reading skills by students of non-linguistic universities which study German as a second foreign language.  Extensive reading is seen as a way of optimization of the teaching situation at the initial stage of foreign language learning. The interest in this type of reading is generated by the fact that reading of high-volume texts lets to expend and to enrich the vocabulary of students, to focus on reading itself and on perceived information. Through extensive reading fast reading skills, forecasting and contextual guess are developed.

The article addresses cognitive and pragmatic functions of neologisms and discusses the characteristic features of new words, as well as possible criteria to identify them. The authors juxtapose the nominative function of neologisms, i.e. the function of naming and denoting new artifacts, and a number of pragmatic functions (expressive, ludic, substitutional, social, spacio­temporal, appellative, compressive and adaptive), which are potentially manifested by the speaker when using neologisms in speech. A neologism is believed to be a marked member of an utterance, and when in the focus of the speaker’s attention, exhibits some or much pragmatic potential. At the same time, nominative and pragmatic functions of neologisms do not exclude but, on the contrary, complement and presuppose each other.

The chapter discusses the specifics of argumentation in everyday communication. The author presents the specifics of the discourse of everyday communication and argumentation as a method of persuasion. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the analysis of the functioning of emotional arguments based on statements of emotional influence (praise, compliment, censure, insult, curse, etc.). These influences act as a tool for regulating the joint activities of people and can change the way of thinking, behavior and actions of interlocutors. Emotional argumentation in the implementation of such statements may be the only, "protruded" element of the statement, the most important for the momentary situation.

This article explores the reader community in surrealism. Surrealism, a inherently verbal and literary movement, devotes special attention to reading: quotes and allusions, the "lives" of poets play a key role in the surrealistic works. However, the ideology of surrealism is constantly changing, becoming more complicated, undergoing theoretical evolution, and the movement itself, after verbal practices, turns first to visual and then to hybrid forms of interaction. The increasing complexity of the theory leads to the formation of a special “prepared” “reader” whose perception is “brought up” by surrealistic techniques. The key here is the development of special sensuality - a kind of hybrid perception of reality, due to the complexity of the surrealist theory. The opposition of the author / reader is gradually being destroyed by the surrealists, and the community of surrealists and their readers takes on the form of an interpreting community (S. Fish).

Avant-garde art, and especially surrealism, is characterized by a specific set of collective practices aimed at realizing non-artistic goals: gaining legitimacy, fighting competitors, and acquiring symbolic power. However, sometimes collective statements and interactions serve to reveal the creative potential of both the entire group and its individual members. For surrealists, the period of “creative collective interactions” falls mainly on the 1920s, and the group in this period is perceived as a field of artistic experiment. Together, surrealists create a number of works, hone techniques and develop a surreal canon. The influence of collective thinking on individual creativity in the 1920s leads to the fact that the surrealists begin to introduce references to the members of the group into non-collective works, actually turning them into heroes of the novel, now making them part of a mutable surreal text.

Examples of such inclusion of group members in an artistic text can be considered works of R. Desnos “Rrose Sélavy” and J.-A. Boiffard “Nomenclature”: in them, the authors deliberately introduce the names of the surrealists, in order to then transform them in the spirit of automatic writing. On the one hand, the appearance of proper names in the texts serves to consolidate the group, create and strengthen intra-group ties, but, on the other hand, such “quoting” is a guarantee of surrealism and confirms the materiality of the word game. Being a part of the surreal world, the surrealist by his presence in it proves the reality of its existence.

the article addresses the question of how the image of a living space evolved and changed between the Old and Middle English periods in the mind of an English speaker, as well as the nominations they used to name artifacts associated with dwellings. Such images are modelled by means of mapping the concept dwelling as it was in OE and ME via its physical manifestations – words. The authors focus on the reasons why new cognitive features of this category may have appeared, while other characteristics of the concept became obsolete in the mind of the medieval Brit. The diachronic analysis of the lexis in correlation with this concept is based on the theory of interpretation fields, which is arguably the best method to trace the many changes in the way dwellings were pictured in the Middle Ages. The authors back their opinion with the analysis of various artifacts associated with dwellings and their functions: medieval buildings, architectural photography, book descriptions of houses, etc. The core features of medieval dwelling are defined as they may have been perceived by native English speakers centuries ago.