In 2023, Russia celebrates the 200th anniversary of Alexander N. Ostrovsky, the famous playwright who portrayed Russia in the epoch of serfdom. The author used the method of continuous sampling to harvest lexical intertextualisms from A. N. Ostrovsky’s plays, as well as the methods of linguistic culturological analysis, interpretation, linguacultural commentary, and systematizing to describe the material. Biblical expressions in A. N. Ostrovsky’s plays are numerous but remain understudied. However, they play an important semantic and linguacultural role in that they render the text a bookish style. Some personages demonstrate the symbolism of biblical words as dominants of their worldview. Quite often, biblical expressions are incomprehensible, archaic, or semantically random, thus revealing poor education. The article focuses on one-lexeme biblical expressions. They could be divided into two groups: 1) proper names, e.g., Jared, Herod, Judas, Lazarus, etc., and related phraseological units, e.g., to sing Lazarus, i.e. to lament or complain; 2) common nouns with a special symbolism in the text, e.g., expanse, vigil, fasting, abstinence, covenant, grace, goodness, bounty, ordeal, brimstone, etc. Each example is provided with comments on their biblical source and the functional characteristics in the context.

Foreign students demonstrate different strategies in interpreting lexical meaning as they struggle to explain new words. This article introduces predominant and secondary semantization strategies in students of Russian as a foreign language. The predominant definition strategy was represented by different models in everyday practice of lexical semantization. Interpretations developed according to two models: 1) denotation and verbally-logical differential characteristics; 2) denotation and visually-efficient differential characteristics. The research hypothesis presupposes a certain correlation between the level of Russian vocabulary acquisition and the default semantization strategy. The research objective was to describe predominant and secondary semantization strategies using general and specific scientific methods. The linguistic experiment involved specific vocabulary of the Russian language, i.e., lexemes house, book, ring, table, and lantern. The results could be used in teaching Russian as a foreign language, as well as to expand the boundaries of research in the ways of foreign vocabulary acquisition.

This article describes 180 modern English neologisms with a professional component. Their structural and semantic features reveal how native speakers perceive and conceptualize new words through spiritual and practical activities, thus adjusting their worldview to the changing reality. The research involved the methods of definitional analysis, word formation, semantic assay, and cognitive-discursive interpretation, as well as various standard linguistic and statistical methods. The material was classified according to the type of professional activity. These lexical and semantic groups were united by intralinguistic links based on interrelated and interdependent connotative shades of meaning. Many neologisms demonstrated a metaphorical basis, which served as a tool for creating expressive images. All the neological units were emotive and evaluative. The emotive content conveyed the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, while the evaluative content was associated with the pragmatic function and contained information about the speaker’s attitude to the denotation. Most professional neologisms were gender-neutral. The universal nature of the images behind the neologisms probably testifies to the current mental changes in a society that values gender equality. Interdiscursivity appeared to permeate all lexical and semantic fields of the English neological space. The heterogeneity reflected the complex activity the speaker performs in an attempt to comprehend a complex and multifaceted environment, which, in turn, gives the neological units an anthropocentric character. The relevance of the research is determined by the rapid development of various social spheres, which inevitably affects the modern communication and the linguistic worldview in general.

Texts of language and culture have a dual organization. The conceptual core contains the values experienced by a culture bearer while the periphery contains meta-concepts that belong to an outside observer. Such duality produces paired concepts of faith – religion, justice – law, hope – prospects, life – existence, etc. This article introduces a new interpretation of duality – not as a binary opposition, but as a semantically close chain of terms and meta-terms. The authors classified texts as those based on value-concepts, meta-concepts, and a mix of the experiences that belong to the culture bearer and the meta-concepts that belong to the observer. The resulting semiotic historical-genetic method makes it possible to detect cultural phenomena and build thematic semantic networks of language and culture that update the values. This leads to permitted and prohibited term usage. For instance, a Russian speaker cannot say I'm goggling because the action described by predicate can be evaluated only by an outside observer. However, one can say he's goggling because this cognitive scenario presupposes an outside observer. Such taboos are associated with terms and meta-terms.

Artistic concepts are linguistic and cultural cognitive concepts processed by a particular author. As a result, they acquire the individuality in the text they belong to. In cultural linguistics, artistic concepts help to describe the individual style of an author as a linguistic personality. This article introduces the cognitive features of the binuclear concept of sea-ocean in B. V. Shergin’s short stories. Mythological universals and Russian mythology made it possible to distinguish additional shades of the concept under study, different from its traditional mythological content. The binuclear concept of sea-ocean proved to be a dual artistic concept. Its cores form an equipolar opposition, i.e., they all share the meaning of water space but differ in antonymic values, e.g., life / death, light / darkness, constancy / variability, creation / destruction, etc. These opposite meanings are not mutually exclusive: in fact, they are quite close. The duality is part of the etymology of lexemes ocean and sea: the former has the meaning of living water while the second contains the seme of death, i.e., dead water. In the mythological worldview of the Pomors, who inhabit the White Sea and Russian Arctic coasts, the sea-ocean is the primary matter in which the never-ending struggle of opposites gives birth to the new Universe, which then perishes and is reborn again. This matter is thought of as a living being. The biomorphic features of the concept are expressed through anthropomorphic and zoomorphic codes. The lexical and semantic field man is represented by such lexemes as old father, gray-haired old man, water king, fair judge, soul builder, musician, singer, etc. The lexical and semantic field animal is limited such lexemes as horse and polar bear. 

The speech-behavioral strategy of discrediting is a manipulative form of information aggression exerted on the consciousness of the mass audience. Since it is inherent in modern media, it affects politics and society and thus needs to be resisted. The article introduces an analysis of combined discrediting tactics that implement the communication strategy of discrediting against the President Biden’s administration. The corpus came from the Tucker Carlson Tonight show and included 563 contexts of combined discrediting tactics. Standard, statistical, and linguistic methods made it possible to classify the discrediting tactics into accusations, insults, negative predictions, deceived expectations, irony, polarization, and comparison. The resulting classification of combined tactics of discrediting included five quantitative groups and 51 content subgroups. The accusation tactics proved to be the most popular combined tactic (260 cases; 60 % of the corpus). Two-component tactics were the most representative (337; 60 %) whereas the subgroup of irony + insult was the most frequent in other subgroups (45; 8 %). Combined tactics had a more significant discrediting effect and a more intensive impact on the target audience.

Floriography is part of many cultures and provides an effective characterization means for a particular linguistic culture. The frame analysis method is a popular tool in phraseology, but it has never been applied to phraseological units with the flowers component. The study examined phraseological units with the flowers component in Russian, English, and Chinese in order to define their role in the corresponding linguistic worldviews. The frame organization analysis made it possible to identify the way these languages categorize reality. Phraseological units with flowers are more typical of Chinese and English; they are less typical of the Russian linguistic culture as a result of the harsh climatic conditions and the farming traditions. In this research, the frame analysis hinted at similar cognitive processes in all the three linguistic cultures, which was manifested as common subframes at all levels. The main subframes included characteristics of the subject, action aimed at the subject, qualitative assessment of reality, and evaluative characteristics of the action. In addition, flower names described different human qualities, characterized an ongoing event, and evaluated actions performed by the subject. Differences were registered at the slot level as a partially overlapping list of qualities, assessments, characteristics, and actions, which reflected the specifics of each national worldview. The results can facilitate intercultural communication for Russian, English, and Chinese speakers. 

The article introduces a comparative analysis of the word order in the communicative structure of the sentence in Russian and Persian. The research also covered means and methods of expressing communicative structure, as well as the rules and patterns of word order on the communicative level. In both languages, the communicative aspect of the sentence is closely related to the word order, which is the main tool of expressing the semantic division of the sentence. However, the communicative word order patterns are different. In the neutral speech, both languages put the theme (background information) in front of the rheme (actual information). In expressive speech, the Russian rheme is placed at the beginning of the sentence while the theme follows it. In other words, the thought moves from the actual information to the background information. When the communicative division of the sentence changes, the word order also changes. Based on the analysis of the word order in neutral and expressive speech, direct and inverted word orders are associated with the function that these components perform in the theme-rheme relationship. Persian, however, has a fixed word order, and allows for no inversion: the theme and the rheme are fixed, and the background information always precedes the new one. In the Russian language, any part of the sentence can be the theme or the rheme. In Persian, the function of the theme or the rheme belongs to particular sentence components. 

The article presents the results of metamodeling of the morphological system of the Russian language. This communicative approach to morphology means distancing it from the reflective (cognitive, nominative) function of a linguistic sign or any sign system to give way to the syntagmatic side, at least as far as synthetic languages are concerned. As a synthetic language, Russian demonstrates a certain rigidity of the text construction algorithms. The synthetic nature of Russian morphology is based on such syntagmatic categories as government and agreement, while the adjunction, i.e., connection of words and word forms in meaning, strengthens the trend towards analyticism. This trend belongs to the content while the separate formation of grammatical and lexical meanings are its external side. Against this synchronous and functional background, the article discusses some diachronic and inherent manifestations of the morphological system. These manifestations are associated with the morphologization of phenomena that are external to morphology, i.e., units, relationships, and categories, and the demorphologization of internal morphological phenomena. The author focuses mostly on the correlation between morphology and syntax.

Linguistic personology has remained a popular linguistic direction in Russia for more than thirty years. This discipline studies a native speaker or a linguistic personality with their own worldview, mentality, language fluency, linguistic creativity, and ability to understand someone else’s speech. The famous Russian philologist Vladimir V. Kolesov (1934–2019) was a prominent figure in Russian linguistics. However, in his last publication, he criticized both the term linguistic personality and the entire linguistic personology. Although specialists overlooked this criticism, it is important for linguistic personology. This article reveals the philosophical and methodological foundations of V. V. Kolesov’s criticism, as well as interprets the arguments he published in 2009-2021. First, the authors traced the development of anti-personological trends in V. V. Kolesov’s lifetime publications. Second, they identified the prerequisites for the criticism of the theory of linguistic personality. Third, they analyzed the posthumous publication of The Conceptual Field of Russian Consciousness as a synthesis that reinterpreted the previous criticism. The methods of contextual analysis, reconstruction, philological hermeneutics, and comparison made it possible to obtain two theoretical models that explain V. V. Kolesov’s conclusions about linguistic personology. The authors believe that the last thirty years of V. V. Kolesov’s scientific work was a gradual slide towards recognizing linguistic personality as an important tool in describing mentality.

Gender aspects have been attracting linguistic attention for quite a while now, raising discussions about the so-called male and female languages. However, the effect of gender on translation remains understudied. This research featured expressive vocabulary in Jerome Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and its Russian translations performed by Rita Rait-Kovaleva (1960) and Maxim Nemtsov (2008). The objective was to determine the effect of gender on translation. The authors believe that the translator’s gender may affect literary images and modify the author’s message. They conducted a comparative analysis of the way translators of different genders transferred stylistically-marked and emotional vocabulary, colloquialisms, slang, and jargon into Russian. The standard methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, systematization, and description revealed some differences in the translation styles, the image of the main character, translation pragmatics, and Salinger’s rather remarkable style. Rita Rait-Kovaleva seemed to soften some harsh statements, neutralize emotional aspects, and avoid colloquial vocabulary by using equivalents, which did not quite fall into the stylistic framework. Her Holden Caulfield turned out to more educated, intelligent, confident, emotional, and gentle. Maxim Nemtsov adhered to a single strategy: he did his best not to deviate from the original. In his attempt to preserve colloquialisms and substandard vocabulary, he often gave neutral words stylistic markers, emotional coloring, or a negative connotation. However, he managed to maintain the original syntax.

Personal worldview can be subjected to linguistic modeling even if the person in question is a fictional character. This research featured the vocabulary invented by the contemporary American writer Dave Eggers for his dystopic dilogy, as well as the role of this fictional language in creating satirical mode. The study involved such methods of cognitive linguistics as component, transformational, and stylistic analyses, analytical description, and semantic fields. The article opens with a review of domestic and foreign publications on the connection between language, social processes, and thinking. The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021) were analyzed for satirical and stylistic devices. The dilogy turned out to be a new type of satire, which combines the postmodern irony and deconstruction with the metamodern openness and optimism. The vocabulary of the future as seen by the author was analyzed for its functions in creating the worldview. Its key features include: neologisms and occasionalisms coined in line with actual word-formation models; contrasting high and low-style vocabulary; euphemisms and modified set phrases. D. Eggers also satirized some real linguistic trends, which, in his opinion, deform the language and affect people’s mind and behavior. 

Vita Karoli Magni (The Life of Charlemagne) was the first medieval biography. It was written by Einhard, a prominent figure of the Carolingian era, who used some biographies of Roman emperors by Suetonius. This article introduces a comparative analysis of Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni and Suetonius’ biographies in terms of structure and composition. The main research objectives were to define to what degree Einhard followed the chosen pattern, as well as to identify the new features the medieval biography acquired as compared with the texts by Suetonius. The study involved descriptive, cultural-historical, comparative-historical, historical-genetic, and formal methods. The author questioned the generally accepted opinion that Einhard relied on Suetonius’s texts. The texts by Einhard and Suetonius are similar in macro-composition, but the former was affected by the Christian tradition of heroic narrative. Suetonius’s stories resembled a friendly conversation that could embrace different points of view. However, Einhard wrote an encomium that was to offer its readers an ideal image of a king. His biography was compiled according to the three-part scheme, typical of hagiographies.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels resonate with the vibes of the current epoch: the fundamental issues that his personages tried to fathom are as relevant now as they were in the XIX century. The problem of communication is one of such issues: oral verbal interaction between people is one of the most disputed problems in modern humanities. The authors relied on the systematic approach, as well as on hermeneutical, analytical, and statistical methods, to analyze the peculiarities of verbal communication in F. M. Dostoevsky’s Demons. The analysis covered the way the author introduced the main characters (Daria Shatova, Pyotr Verkhovensky, Stavrogin, Lebyadkin, Marya Lebyadkina, Kirillov) through their speech and made it possible to build their speech profiles. As for the forms and functions of speech communication, the authors believe that F. M. Dostoevsky understood the need for human communication as fundamental and urgent. The writer tested his personages for this need: it was through interpersonal communication that Dostoevsky’s characters manifested their existence and attitudes.