Vol 16, No 1 (2025)

Inter-BRICS cooperation is one of the priorities of Russian foreign policy. This indicates a need to understand perceptions of Russia’s image construal and mechanisms of its formation in BRICS’ media discourses. The study seeks to identify the peculiarities of Russia’s image construal in South African media discourse (2011-2024). The source of the material was the NOW corpus (News on the Web) that allowed for creating a virtual sub-corpus. The latter included 1000 articles in English, published in major South African newspapers. Corpus and computer linguistics techniques were used to get frequency lists, find N-grams, collocations and thematic clusters: the NOW corpus manager and the Conceptoscope software analytical complex. The frame, metaphorical modeling, cognitive and discourse methods were used to qualitatively analyze the data. The findings suggest that the image of Russia is framed indirectly in South African discourse: through other countries’ images and interstate relations. The diagnostic frame “partnership” and two prognostic subframes “progress” and “degradation” are dominant in structuring Russia’s image construal. The frame “partnership” is actualized by lexemes with the semantics of cooperation, jointness, and metaphors of “relationship”. The prognostic subframe “progress” is manifest in the use of lexemes with the semantics of expansion, increase, deepening, and “path” metaphors. The prognostic subframe “degradation” is textualized through metaphors with negative connotations. The findings have important implications for clarifying the criteria of frame identification, relying on corpus-based and computational tools, developing discourse theory by introducing the data of South African media discourse.

The general values and beliefs of society can be reflected through the attitude towards war. This work is devoted to the identification and analysis of linguistic and cultural concepts of war and their nature in the Chinese linguistic consciousness. Against the background of the foreign policy rapprochement between Russia and China, which stimulates mutual cultural and educational exchange and contacts in various fields, it seems important to consider the conceptual and axiological content of the concept frame WAR (战争) and its interpretation in Chinese linguoculture. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to consider the conceptual concepts of the socio-political phenomenon of war of Chinese cultural speakers in their linguistic consciousness. To achieve this goal, research tasks were consistently solved: the cultural and historical experience of understanding the phenomenon of war in the Chinese cultural tradition, in particular in Chinese philosophy and literature, was determined; the results of a definitional etymological analysis of lexemes representing the concept of WAR were presented; the results of previous studies of phraseological units with cultural and semantic components of the concept of WAR are summarized; the features of the representation of various military conflicts in the modern media discourse of the China are considered; the results of previously conducted associative experiments with the stimulus word “war” for representatives of Russian and Chinese linguistic cultures are interpreted; the data obtained are compared with the results of a study of intercultural variability in the perception of metaphorical models with the sphere of the goal is WAR. The analysis of attitudes towards war in the context of cultural parameters represented in the linguistic structures and speech practices of the people allows for a better understanding of the basic principles and values on which the mentality of various national cultures is based. In this regard, it seems relevant not only to identify the components of the WAR concept frame, but also, in particular, to study its various linguistic representations at various linguistic levels.

The purpose of this article is to consider the linguistic features of the representation of a number of states and their heads in the American media discourse and to identify the influence of the language of the media and the political orientation of the publication on the construction of the image of the state and its leader. The analysis of publications in the journal “Foreign Affairs” devoted to such countries as Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and their heads of state is carried out. American journalists attribute the political regime of these countries to autocracies, and the leaders to populists. In this regard, the relevance of the study is due not only to the wide interest in the problem of constructing the image of the state and the image of a political leader from a wide range of specialists, including political scientists, sociologists, linguists, psychologists, etc., but also to the influence of media texts on the formation and transformation of the image in the mind of the addressee. The subject of the study is the lexical and stylistic means of representing the images of the above-mentioned countries and their heads of state in the media text. The object of the study is the analytical articles of the journal “Foreign Affairs”, which reflect the socio-political realities. In this study, the methods of stylistic analysis, semantic analysis, contextual analysis of political media texts, as well as a descriptive method, including the generalization and interpretation of the information received, were used. The conclusion is made about the formation of the image of the country and its leader based on the reception of contrast, the wide inclusion of pejorative semantics, intertextuality techniques, lexical means of various stylistic tonality in the text, and the implementation by the authors of media texts of various strategies in imposing a certain image of the country and its leader on the addressee.

It should be noted that in the fiction of the XX century, lexical units from various types of jargon, argot, youth slang are quite common, but the theme and communicative goal of the author of the text play an important role. The article examines the use of various substandard linguistic phenomena in the artistic discourse of the second half of the XX century - early XXI century. Since artistic discourse is a reality reinterpreted by the creative imagination of the author, then in the second half of the XX century, the use of substandard vocabulary and phraseology became necessary in a number of literary texts. Numerous linguistic studies note a certain feature: the activation of substandard vocabulary and its use in colloquial speech reduce the expressive potential of the vocabulary and phraseology of the standard, which correlates with the literary language. Analyzing substandard vocabulary within the framework of the artistic space of Russian literature of the late XX - early XXI century, it should be noted that this vocabulary has become actively in demand in works of various genres. In this context, we can note its active use in works of the detective genre, in fiction and fiction-publicistic works that comprehend the era of the Great Terror, as well as in works about youth and for youth young people. Modern research in the field of studying the substandard vocabulary of artistic discourse allows us to fully analyze the modern language space. The modern language substandard implements various functions in literary texts, from nominative to cognitive and cumulative, from the expression of emotions to vivid evaluativeness. The substandard is currently becoming a source of replenishment of the stylistically reduced layer of modern colloquial speech.

Nowadays, gender problematization in scientific discourse is caused by the clash of traditionalist and globalist tendencies of gender identification. Language models of gender stereotype allow us to reconstruct the structural organization of MAN/WOMAN concepts in the modern group interpretation of native Russian speakers, objectified in lexico-thematic conceptualization and categorization. The lexico-semantic way of expressing conceptual gender characteristics is the most representative; the profiling mechanism is activated by the polysemanticism of linguistic units. Speech models of gender stereotype represent a cognitive mechanism of selection, interpretation, and evaluation of verbal means, their definition area is conceptually thematic groups as a set of knowledge about gender, interpreted in a specific discourse. The conceptual transformation of gender is projected primarily onto the basic categorical structure of the conceptual and thematic field of gender-marked knowledge, where prototypical effects are directly manifested. The central definition areas of gender characteristics when describing men is the thematic block “Personal characteristics” (802 contexts), when describing women - “Fulfilment spheres” (1077 contexts). In the thematic block “Personal characteristics”, when describing men and women, character traits in the traditional interpretation become the dominant group. In the thematic block “Fulfilment spheres” the employment of women in various spheres of public life and the development of new professions are actively discussed, which indicates an increase in the importance of the implementation sphere in the structure of the concept WOMAN. Lexico-grammatical and speech representation of masculinity and femininity in the text corpus enable us to identify traditional asymmetries and certain egalitarian tendencies: overcoming discursive invisibility of women and their discrimination on the basis of intellect; expanding men’s rights in the family sphere; partial overcoming of “toxic” masculinity; expanding the spheres of social realization of men and especially women; the importance of personal fulfilment, moral motivation of behavioral reactions, successful public image for men and women.

The present paper deals with lexical and semantic features of selected animal idioms as reflected in the actual use in the journalistic style. They are investigated within the textual corpora English Web 2020 (enTenTen20) and Russian Web 2011 (ruTenTen11) with the help of the search tool Sketch Engine. The analysis of the semantic properties of the animal idioms demonstrates that they contain both positive and negative elements of meaning related to pragmatic tools of influence and persuasion, which are actually influential on the receiver´s understanding of the surrounding reality; the contexts where they appear are divided into several categories for each studied language showing their positive/negative connotations. The outcomes demonstrate that their contemporary extent includes not only their definitions from dictionaries of idioms; it is broadened and subsequently reflected in the modification in the receiver´s mental picture of the world. Moreover, the evaluative function of idioms together with their discourse roles are described in terms of strong adjectives, possessive pronouns, modal verbs, and imperatives utilization.

Theoretical postulates of linguistic analysis contained in nine Mukhin’s monographs are researched. Based on the methods of linguistic modeling and experiment, these works described more than 400 elementary syntactic units - syntaxemes: positional, optional, combinatorial. Syntaxeme is a unique unit - invariant. Syntax and semantic features make up the content of the syntaxeme. The content features of syntaxemes are diagnosed on the basis of their distributional features. Studies of functional syntax have revealed a number of regularities: syntaxemes are system units endowed with syntactic and semantic features; differential syntactic features are asemantic and reflect the functions of the components in the structure of the sentence, that is, they are elementary units. The repetition of features, the oppositional series of syntaxemes, the autonomy and originality of synsematic and syntactic features proper are the regularities concerning the interaction of syntaxemes and components of a sentence. The purpose of the article is to formulate the established regularities of functional syntax associated with the functioning of newly discovered syntactic units. The novelty of the work lies in the substantiation of the two laws of language discovered by A.M. Mukhin. The first law concerns the interaction of sentence components and syntaxemes and states that linguistic reality does not allow mixing of the syntactic feature of homogeneity and syntactic-semantic features, which are carried by the components of the sentence and syntaxemes. The second law is about the repetition of features of syntaxemes. These features allowed A.M. Mukhin to establish 27 oppositional rows of syntaxemes.

Linguistic and cognitive disorders in children with cardiovascular diseases or operated for congenital heart disease are a relevant research topic. Such studies contribute to developing new rehabilitation programs, especially when they are conducted against conditionally healthy peers. This research featured the linguistic aspect of the productive and reproductive speech of teenagers operated for congenital heart disease and their healthy peers. The reproductive test involved 31 patients aged 13-15 years who had undergone cardiopulmonary bypass surgery for congenital heart disease at the Research Institute of Complex Problems of Cardiovascular Diseases, Kemerovo, and 35 conditionally healthy middle school students of the same age. The productive test involved 28 patients and 26 healthy peers. In line with T.A. Fotekova and T.V. Ahutina’s diagnostic method, the children hat to retell a 54-word story and give a spontaneous speech about their home town. In the reproductive speech test, the patients demonstrated an inability to literally reproduce text, which was significantly compensated by paraphrasing skills and led to an abundance of unique word forms, compared to the healthy teenagers. In the productive speech test, the patients often had problems generating utterances, which were often presented as incomplete sentences. However, we could not detect a serious degree agrammatism, which would manifest itself in the inability to coordinate parts of speech.

Throughout the history of mankind, the role of the mother in society has had a special axiological status. The special value of the status of a mother was in the upbringing of the younger generation, the transmission of cultural and spiritual values. At the same time, certain specific features are found in the perception of the image of the mother by one or another people. The purpose of our research is to analyze the features of the concept of MOTHER in Russian linguoculture, which are significant for native speakers of the Russian language of the late XX and early XXI centuries. It was found that for speakers of Russian linguistic culture, a MOTHER is not only a woman with children, but also something close, dear, a source of life, and spiritual value. But if, according to the associative experiment of 1998-1999. at the end of the XX century, the image of the mother existed in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language along with the image of the father (the most frequent reaction), then in 2023-2024. the mother embodies the image of the whole family, since the associate father is a single one. Such a semantic shift is caused, in our opinion, by the following extralinguistic factors: an increase in the number of single-parent families, single mothers. It should also be noted that some of the conceptual features of the concept of MOTHER, reconstructed on the basis of data from explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, are not updated in the associative fields of the lexeme of the mother verbalizer of the corresponding concept. Signs such as ‘a female in relation to her cubs’, ‘a nun, the wife of a clergyman’, ‘addressing an elderly woman or wife’ are not significant for young speakers of Russian linguistic culture.

In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution aggravated by new challenges facing the humanity, there is a need to consider the significance of developing global citizenship competencies. Public discourse together with those who manage the flows of information in the globalizing world is an indicator of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the present stage of development. Professional public relations (PR) education at the present stage is closely linked to the ESG system (environmental social governance) and the language instilled in the future specialists, as it reflects the mode of life of society at a particular moment in time. The milieu determines the way of thinking, the worldview which is reflected in the lexical units used to determine new trends and common concerns, having in their turn a reciprocal influence on the changing world view of the people of the globe. The objective of the research is to identify the structural elements of the global citizenship competence development as well as the words and phrases, revealing the major challenges of the present day international community. The methodology concentrates on the recent research of international public relations discourse of different scholars with special regard to global issues. The methods of analysis, synthesis, classification alongside philological analysis were used to contribute to the present holistic study. The results of the investigation have shown that to develop global citizenship competence within ESG paradigm PR undergraduates should concentrate on tackling the urgent issues confronting the world by means of problem discussions that raise awareness and suggest solutions to them. Certain exercises are given to identify certain verbal clusters used in the English language and beyond to become international words and phrases to be taught as part of global citizenship competence in terms of professional PR education governing the way to mass adoption of the universal language.

In the 21st century, the interdisciplinary research interest is increasingly aroused by the linguistic problem of realizing educational discourse, especially in the media space. Information ecology and cyber security make it possible to form the skill of making adequate educational, and managerial decisions in the field of education under the conditions of saturation with information, information noise in the digital environment. The purpose of the study is to identify the genre features of the educational media discourse in the context of information ecology and cyber security. A functional-genre analysis of the educational media discourse in the digital media space is carried out in the study. By applying a set of methods (descriptive method, content analysis, discursive analysis, linguosemiotic analysis, linguopragmatic analysis, functional-genre analysis, interpretive analysis), the genre media reflection of the regulation of society’s activities to achieve hygienic safety goals related to information is studied, which constitutes the scientific novelty of the study. The main genres of the educational media discourse that are significant for the development of genre theory have been identified, those are: analytical, popularizing, explanatory, didactic, regulating, recommendation, discussion, multimedia, case study genres. Their analyses allow conclude that an ecosystem comfortable for training students is formed due to compliance with the requirements of information ecology, information and Internet hygiene, ethics, cyber security, which are among the preventive trends and protective measures in the digital environment. The analysis of factual material emphasizes the importance of ensuring the safety of students as one of the key tasks of the modern educational process, considering the active influence of the media environment. It is established that media articles inform an addressee about the activities of preventive medicine and state sanitary and epidemiological services that are developing norms that reflect the safe organization of the work and educational process using information tools in the digital media space. Documents presented in various media genres determine the norms of lighting at different times of the day, the norms of noise parameters and work with electronic teaching aids and other acceptable conditions to ensure high-quality work without harm to health. The identified genre features of the educational media discourse in the context of information ecology and cyber security clearly demonstrate that the informational ecology is a promising direction for the study and development of the media discourse, incl. educational media discourse, based on the material of various linguistic cultures.