The article features the compositional semantics of phrasal verbs that denote a cognitive activity, as well as the interaction between their conceptual structure and the particle. The conceptual structures of these components can be described as mental schemes, e.g., a container with a certain vector of cognitive projection, and a number of subtypes. The compositional semantics of phrasal verbs of cognitive activity revealed that the interaction between the conceptual structure of the verb and the particle is a cognitive mechanism that develops its semantics. The container metaphor is based on the semantic potential of the verbal component and such particles as in, out, and through. These particles are usually combined with verbs of movement, physical activity, and perception. As part of phrasal verbs of mental activity, they realize the following prototypical concepts: the subject / object of the action gets into / penetrates into the container, is out / outside of the container, or crosses the border of the container, respectively. The role of the container belongs not to real objects, but to abstract entities, e.g., memory, consciousness, attention, feelings, thoughts, etc., as well as various physical and mental states or situations in which objects are immersed.

The article deals with the Chinese vernacular urbanonyms as part of the modern urban language and culture. The author studied the origins and use of popular urbanonyms with their speech practices and nominative creativity. The research involved some methods of cultural and social linguistics, as well as an online questionnaire of Chengdu citizens. The respondents saw vernacular urbanonyms as a sign of familiarity with the urban environment. Such words were popular with young people and working-age residents, regardless of their education background. In general, vernacular urbanonyms were seen as part of informal interpersonal communication and were evaluated quite positively. According to the respondents, vernacular urbanonyms emerge for the following reasons. They contrast with boring official names because they are "vivid" and "lively", with emotional, evaluative and figurative connotations. They help to distinguish between similar environmental objects with the same functions. They are shorter than official names. They identify nameless urban objects. They preserve old names that are out of official use. The onomasiological analysis established that vernacular urbanonyms verbalize a number of motives, e.g., a landmark, a reinterpretation of official urban names, a reduced official name, a metaphor, phonetic similarity with the official name, etc. As a result of social practices of ordinary city culture, vernacular urbanonyms reflect the values of everyday city life, e.g., wayfinding, linguistic economy, expressiveness, and subjectivity. The pragmatics of urbanonyms reveal crude folk humor and irony. However, some of them demonstrate positive and even lyrical imagery, which is typical of Chinese national linguistic culture.

Idioms express emotional states, e.g., grief, anger, joy, sadness, fear, etc. However, they can also reveal the values, moral qualities, and directive potential of the speaker. This article reviews some existing approaches to phraseological studies and introduces an authentic comprehensive approach that covers syntactic, figurative, historical, axiological, and pragmatic levels. The material was obtained from film dialogues and analyzed from the communicative-pragmatic standpoint. The goal was to reveal the ethnic and cultural aspect of idiomatic expressions in Chinese cinema discourse. In the Chinese series 靠近你温暖我 (Close to You, Make Me Warm), the authors identified a number of idioms that explicated the following concepts: 独守空房 (dúshǒu kōngfáng) – Loneliness; 守身如玉 (shǒu shēn rú yù) – Honesty, 人算不如天算 (rénsuàn bùrú tiānsuàn) – Justice, 相亲相爱 (xiāngqīn xiāng’ài) – Love, 藕断丝连 (ǒu duàn sī lián) – Parting;白头偕老 (báitóu xiélǎo) – Marriage; 百闻不如一见 (bǎiwén bùrú yījiàn) – Trust; 两肋插刀 (liǎng lèi chā dāo) – Friendship. The new approach proved able to identify the value and pragmatics of phraseological units.

Internet communication and its genres are one of the most relevant issues of modern linguistics. Genres of Internet communication are in constant development. Internet chats started as a platform of phatic communication that provided leisure activities. These days, group chats serve a lot of purposes. For instance, commercial group chats are aimed at online buying and selling. This research focused on two Viber commercial chats that united women-customers and sellers from the city of Saratov (2021–2023). The discursive analysis revealed conflict-free environment, which is not typical of phatic chats, where anonymity usually contributes to the violation of communication and ethical standards. The authors identified the means of harmonizing communication that communicants resorted to for effective interaction. The participants created a benevolent atmosphere by using hypocoristic proper names, emoticons, complementarity, etc. Etiquette genres of greetings, gratitude, compliments, congratulations, and wishes resulted in a balanced communication. Tactics of conflict prevention included solidarity, mitigation, e.g., diminutives, reminders, concern for the addressee, assessment, courtesy, humor, etc. The resulting communicative attraction contributed to effective communication between sellers and buyers. The positive communication experience in such chats may improve the real communication.

In 2020, German media experienced a surge of publications about vaccination against COVID-19, which demonstrated a great diversity of linguistic tools that could shape public opinion on the matter. This article introduces a study of neological processes in the German language in the post-pandemic period. The research relied on the method of corpus diagnostics to develop a linguistic reconstruction of the COVID-19 vaccination as a media event. The research covered 612 news articles published in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021. The Voyant Tools software generated a corpus of news texts with Impfung for a subsequent analysis, which made it possible to reveal lexical trends, correlations, and collocations. The corpus analysis provided a linguistic reconstruction of the vaccination against COVID-19 in the German-speaking countries. Austrian and Swiss media discourse emphasized the need for vaccination for all citizens while Germany focused on the social aspects of vaccination. Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca appeared to be the most discussed vaccines in the German-speaking area.

Addendum
Conflict discourse studies provide a valuable insight into linguistic and sociocultural ideologies of online communities. They also may offer effective approaches to linguistic detoxification. This research featured online communication of sport fans. Their discourse is interdiscursive, possesses a certain netiquette, and reflects the social and ideological diversity within the community. The authors explored common speech strategies aimed at threatening the social identity of outsiders or at the acquisition of power. The material involved an array of comments posted on Sports.ru: each example was tested for speech aggression, and the conflict-marked comments were described from the strategy perspective. The sampling relied on the general intention and expressive vocabulary aimed at the addressee. The frequency distribution of impoliteness strategies revealed that users often tended to assert power through personal characterization of their opponents, e.g., agism, sarcasm, hypercorrect speech behavior, identity attacks via derogatory team nominations, etc. The analysis identified various conflict strategies employed to form derogatory nominations, as well as defined the socio-cultural characteristics that marked the addressee as a target of conflictladen speech behavior.

Lexical suffixation is an essential feature of the Salish language family. Such suffixes form closed classes of morphemes that express various types of meaning, e.g., somatisms, locatives, natural phenomena, artefacts, phytonyms, etc. Most Salish lexical suffixes are of substantive nature. However, they hardly ever correspond with free forms of substantives, be it synchronically or diachronically. The authors reviewed a number of theories concerning the origin and development of the Salish lexical suffixes. Based on the synchronic and diachronic analysis, they put forward the following hypothesis of the origin of the Salish lexical suffixes. The suffixes stared as a dependent predicative construction, eventually compressed into a morphologically-coherent model according to the following evolution scheme: dependent predication / nominalized predicate → compounding / incorporation → lexical suffix (bound morpheme). Thus, the synchronous Salish substantives are diachronically based on verbal stems with their process semantics. The study adds to the linguistic understanding of the origin of various parts of speech and the borders between substantives and verbs.

At its present stage, the Italian language of informal communication seems to demonstrate a lot of innovations. For example, the colloquial use of verb tenses is limited to Presente Indicativo, Passato Prossimo or Passato Remoto, Imperfetto, and Trapassato Prossimo. The obvious simplification of the verb system eventually expands the functions of each tense. However, a diachronic analysis may prove that this process is not as innovative as it seems. This research featured Italian comedies of the XVI century, which saw the emergence of a unified state language. The comedies provide a valuable research material: in pursuit of comic effect, their texts often imitated the contemporary colloquial speech. As a result, they yield a lot of valuable examples of everyday communication of previous centuries. Characters that portrayed lower-class people often used tenses in their secondary functions, e.g., they replaced the subjunctive with the indicative, used the present to indicate the near future, formulated polite requests with the help of the imperfect, the functions of the future tense were narrowed down to an epistemic modality, etc. Therefore, the modern Italian language is not developing new constructions: it is undergoing a re-standardization, where colloquial phenomena are gradually becoming a norm. The prescriptive norm is being replaced by a descriptive one, which reflects the actual speech of native speakers.

The research featured experimental material obtained from Udmurt, Bashkir, and Tatar respondents as part of a psycholinguistic approach to the study of lexical meaning by its associative field. This approach is connected with the knowledge representation in the linguistic consciousness of native speakers and the specifics of ethnic stereotypes. The study owes its scientific novelty to the fact that it is a first of its kind comparative psycholinguistic study of the word semantics that involves the speakers of Udmurt, Bashkir, and Tatar. The study identified the semantic content and structure of the associative fields of the lexeme life in the abovementioned languages. It relied on the associative reactions received from the native speakers of Udmurt, Bashkir, and Tatar. The results of the psycholinguistic associative experiments served as the basic linguistic material for further cross-cultural research. The associative fields included the correlates of the lexeme life in the three languages: ulon (Udmurt), gumer (Bashkir), and gomer (Tatar). The quantitative and qualitative parameters allowed the author to identify universal and distinctive components in the content of the associative structures. The responses of Bashkir and Tatar speakers were mostly stereotypical in the core of the associative field. Paradigmatic reactions prevailed over syntagmatic ones in all associative fields. The qualitative interpretation of cognitive strategies appeared to be universal for the Udmurts, Bashkirs, and Tatars. The identification process was based on a specific mental image of a subject or object, as well as on emotionally-colored and evaluative signs as part of a semanteme. Unlike the Udmurt speakers, the Bashkirs and Tatars gave lengthy and explanatory reactions to the stimulus. The results can be used in teaching these national languages or as an effective tool for the formation of a multilingual personality through the study of associative lexical fields. In linguistic theories of semantics, an associative field can be used as a structured model for analyzing semantic representations of a word. The obtained results contribute to solving a certain range of theoretical issues related to the problem of mental vocabulary and human speech activity.

Author’s individual style and its preservation in translation are a relevant issue of translation practices. This research is the first attempt in domestic linguistics to study Zadie Smith’s individual style and its manifestation in translation based on M. Yu. Mukhin’s analysis model. The methodology involved the methods of semantic interpretation, comparative analysis, content analysis, quantitative calculations, and linguistic analysis based on the conceptual profile model. The study featured Z. Smith's novel On Beauty and its translation performed by O. Kachanova and A. Vlasova. The analysis revealed the most frequent linguistic and stylistic means and denotative spheres and classes, e.g., such lexical means as simile, interjection, metaphor, allusion, and lexical repetition; various phonographic means, e.g., capitalization, graphic imagery, excessive punctuation, and graphon used to portray a wide variety of accents, etc. The official Russian edition conveyed the actual meaning and the lexical speech portraits by an effective use of various translation transformations, e.g., word order, lexical substitution, compensation, etc. In most cases, literal translation proved to be appropriate as it preserved the metagraphemic of the original text. However, the graphic fixation of the characters’ speech not always found its reflection in the translation text.

Defendants’ and victims’ characteristic has always been an important part of forensic rhetoric in a jury trial. This research featured speeches by such famous Russian lawyers and prosecutors of the XIX century as F. N. Plevako, N. V. Muravyov, P. A. Aleksandrov, and A. F. Koni, who described the criminal and the victim in their speeches to offer the jury a general insight into the case and allow them to develop a legal and moral profile of the defendant and the complainant. The study introduces a theoretical and practical understanding of the rhetorical significance of this element of forensic speech as part of persuasion technique in a jury trial. The results obtained can be used as recommendations for practicing lawyers. The following axiological and semantic provisions can optimize the compilation of modern court speeches. 1. Negative description of the victim can make the jury distrust the victim’s statement, which is a positive factor for the defense. 2. If the lawyer manages to evoke compassion and pity for the victim, it may reduce the defendant's chances for an acquittal or mitigation. 3. Stories from the defendant’s childhood that reveal their character development give the speaker the opportunity to change the jury’s attitude. 4. A portrait given by individual qualities also makes it possible to form a necessary attitude to the personality of the defendant.

Modern online media offer online news magazines with commenting options for children from 8 to 12 years old. This paper features children's comments in their relation to the structure of a French-language political news text designed as Inverted pyramid. Children's comments to political news aimed at their age group are a new and unexplored scientific object. The research relied on the concept of cognitive constructivism of moral consciousness and involved such methods as content and intent analyses. Children proved to be active readers of political news: they expressed their opinions on the information presented in such structural elements as Lead, Body, Background, and Tail. The greatest response was triggered by Background, which narrates the facts that influenced the news event. Children usually reacted to information about victims of political events, political protesters, descriptions of life situations they can associate with, and events of global significance.

Political communication has its pecularities in each subject of the Russian Federation. This research compared the official website and Instagram of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with those of the Communist Party of the Republic of Tyva. The research revealed the basic characteristics of political communication in Tyva, the integration of regional political organizations into Internet communication, and their ability to use the manipulative potential of social networks. The Tuva Communist Party demonstrated a high level of virtual communication with social network users. The regional political communication was oriented towards unique content that reflected the regional specifics of political discourse. The posts were short, with a lot of infographics; the material was adapted to the requirements of the addressee by highlighting key categories.

The article describes the existential category of the Other and the Otherness in V. Sorokin's screenplay for the film called 4, which was directed by I. Hrzhanovsky in 2004. The Otherness helped V. Sorokin to realize his artistic idea of post-Soviet Russia. According to Jean Paul Sartre, the Other conveys a feeling of the last days: without a single scene of physical violence, the reader develops a feeling of nausea. The essence of the Other is based on the principles of rejection, fear, and inevitability; the Other is the only verifier of one’s existence. In 4, the frightening atmosphere of the Other World is created by such artistic means as coding, dying, masking, and deconstruction of symmetry. They highlight the artistic intent to portray the chaotic nature of being and the absence of time, where human fate is meaningless, and people are reduced to functions in the game of life. The Otherness of the chronotype gives the script and the film a new code: the loss of the holy number four desacralizes existence, thus condemning the world and people in it to a life of hopeless dismay.

The integration of the author into the cultural context is a two-faceted problem. In the post-information age, literary parody is regarded as a way of socio-cultural communication. The article features the congeniality of two chronologically distant works of science fiction against their contemporary context, namely Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Loss of Breath vs. Ray Bradbury’s Emissary and There Was an Old Woman. This pioneering research is an attempt to trace how the genre of science-fiction short story changed from the age of European Gothic to the era of mass literature, as well as to define the role of the cultural and social context of the New World in this process. The author reduced the short stories into two conditional pairs to demonstrate the hidden connections between the two sets. The methods of narrative analysis, literary comparison, and the theory of intertextuality revealed a multiple latent presence of other texts. In his Ligeia, E. A. Poe borrowed the genre conventions of the English Gothic novel while parodying the grandiloquent style of the French Romantic literature and the rhetoric of fear typical of the German Gothic style. R. Bradbury, in his turn, imitated the style and subject matter of Poe-esque extravaganzas while parodying the plot composition and artistic language employed by his older contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. Ultimately, the study revealed the evolutionary similarity of the two poetics of parody. In their early career, both Poe and Bradbury mocked the style of popular magazines. Later, both writers came to the parody of the literary classic and focused on high examples of parody art. Poe and Bradbury contributed to the development of the genre of parody in the XIX and XX centuries, respectively. The article marks the ten-year anniversary of Ray Bradbury's death.

This article discusses laughter as one of the structure-forming themes in Ksenia Buksha's novel Advent (2021). The novel consists of two parts, the retrospective one being graphically separated from the main narrative. The theme of laughter does not seem to be connected with the event part; however, it brings about several sidelines. Methodologically, the research relied on the theory of motif developed by I. V. Silantiev, where the motif is considered as part of the narrative. The variability of laughter in literature is complemented by its multifaceted character in philosophy and culture. The works by S. S. Averintsev, L. V. Karasev, and M. T. Ryumina made it possible to understand the semantics of laughter as a cultural and social phenomenon. In her novel, K. Buksha hardly ever links laughter with the category of comic: in fact, laughter almost never accompanies mockery. As a rule, laughter in Advent is involuntary and unmotivated. It is associated with the true, imaginary, or impossible liberation of the characters from eternal routine and malign infinity, be it their entire lives or just a depressing episode. The laughter moments belong both to the main and episodic characters, which indicates that laughter is a universal symbol of crisis. This interpretation contributes to a deeper philosophical and ontological understanding of the contemporary Russian literature.