Vol 16, No 1 (2024)

The article deals with color-term lexemes in the modern Russian and Chinese languages. The focus is on a comparative study of the semantics and functioning of the lexemes ‘zelenyi’ (green), ‘绿’ (green, lü), and ‘青’ (a polysemous color name with the meaning of ‘green’, qing) in the Russian and Chinese mass media; their language connotations are investigated. The study employed the descriptive and comparative methods and the method of contextual analysis. The article analyzes the main and implied meanings of green-color terms through the examples of expressions and phrases with a green lexeme found in Russian and Chinese linguistic databases such as the Standardized terminology base for foreign translation of Chinese characteristic discourse, Russian National Corpus, General Internet Corpus of Russian, etc. The author seeks to investigate the multiple meanings of green-color lexemes in the Russian and Chinese languages, notes the expansion of their meaning, especially in the Russian and Chinese mass media. The conducted research shows that the emergence of the new meaning of the green-color lexeme is closely connected with the cultural and social changes in Russia and China. The importance of using linguocultural color lexemes in the language of modern media is emphasized by the fact that the lexeme ‘green’ as a bright language feature performs the function of expressive informing, conveys the national value. The initial analysis of the polysemy and metaphoricity of the Chinese lexeme ‘青’(qing) carried out in the article fills a gap in the study of the use of the polysemous color name ‘青’ (qing) in translation of texts written by the Russian classics into Chinese and contributes to further in-depth lexicosemantic, lexicographical, and translation studies on the translation of this lexeme.

The article deals with gratitude slogans in German political communication and aims to analyze the functions of such slogans, to identify their fundamental features related to their structure and the meanings they can convey, and to classify the slogans. Data for this study were collected from the minutes of the German governments’ meetings held between 1930 and 1959. Utterances expressing gratitude in political communication are motivational and inspirational in nature because they are aimed at changing the recipient’s emotional condition and are used to change the audience’s attitude toward the problem discussed. The article pays much attention to the classification of gratitude slogans into different types. Such slogans used in political communication in Germany can be divided into three groups: appeals, statements, and slogans comprising the qualities of both appeals and statements. Slogans of all the three types are declarative in nature. In terms of content, a gratitude slogan in political communication can convey: gratitude itself; prognostic gratitude; the need to express gratitude; an appeal to be grateful (can be expressed both implicitly and explicitly); gratitude-manipulation; prognostic ingratitude. Having analyzed the capability of the speech act of gratitude and its combinations with other speech acts, the author has discovered that they are most often combined with demands, appeals, and requests. Such compatibility allows these speech acts to mutually influence each other, which results in gratitude obtaining the features and functional properties of slogans. This study has shown that gratitude slogans have significant influential potential and come in many different forms; however, their historical connection with the language of the Nazi Party had a negative impact on the frequency of use and the expressiveness of such slogans.

The study discusses multimodal perceptual situations presented in a literary text as a feature of the author’s mind style. The perceptual component of world perception is considered to be the result of unique perceptual experience, thus, it is argued that the perceptual component of the text structure reflects the mind style of its author. The analysis of the situation of perception provided in the paper is based on the concept of speech registers. A speech register implemented in a text appears as a model of the speaker’s worldview that determines the language means used in the text in accordance with the communicative situation, and vice versa, makes it possible to identify the features of the perception of reality based on the lingual means used by the author. The research is based on data obtained from a number of J. Steinbeck’s literary works totaling 830 pages. The research methods used include componential, contextual, and linguo-stylistic analysis. The analysis prompts the following conclusions: multimodality within a literary text is conveyed through the use of a variety of lexical, phonetic, syntactic lingual means as well as expressive means based on conceptual metaphors with visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile semantic components, thus evoking corresponding planes of perception. Perceptual images depicted in the descriptive register help convey the ideas, the topics raised in a literary work, serve as a means of text composition, and create a cinematic effect within the text. The abovementioned testifies to the distinctiveness of the author’s mind style, which manifests itself in the representation of perceptual experience through various modalities simultaneously, in synesthetic metaphors, multimodal presentation of the results of perception by visual submodalities.

The article analyzes the Russian oral spontaneous monologue story in a non-native language. The aim of the work is a comprehensive analysis of hesitation phenomena (HP) in Russian oral monologue stories presented by Chinese speakers. The main research methods used in the work are descriptive (contextual), quantitative (simple quantitative calculations), comparative and experimental (transcription of recorded texts). The material for the analysis was taken from 20 monologues of native Chinese speakers on the topic ‘How do you spend time on vacation?’ from the corpus of Russian monologue speech created at St. Petersburg State University and known as the ‘Balanced Annotated Text Library’. The paper describes different HP in such a monologue, calculates the frequency of their occurrence; the data obtained are compared with the results of similar studies conducted based on the material of the Russian speech of the Chinese. The analysis showed that in the Russian oral monologue story delivered by the Chinese, there are present not only all the types of HP known in the scientific literature but also some phenomena peculiar only to the speech of the Chinese. Physical hesitation pauses, non-speech sounds, vowel stretches, word breaks, and repetitions-hesitations are the most typical (top 5) HP in their speech. This is consistent with the results of other studies, based on the material of both monologues-stories and other types of monologue speech (reading, retelling, description of an image). The results of the research not only contribute to the study of spontaneous oral speech and phonetics of Russian as a foreign language, but can also be useful in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language, especially in the Chinese audience, because they can help the Chinese to improve the effectiveness of real communication in Russian.

This study is the first to present a cross-cultural comparison of the specifics of the Kazakh and English national characters through comic perception. Kindness, observance of national traditions, humor, a certain strictness in behavior are integral qualities in the character of both the Kazakhs and Englishmen. The novel under study shows the modern life of the nomenklatura workers of Kazakhstan and a search for the ancient treatise NOMENCLATURA by the British, both depicted satirically in terms of the national and cultural specifics. The study employs the comparative method to analyze irony, the ironic, and the laughter contrast in the novel. These techniques highlight negative qualities such as greed, thirst for profit obtained through every possible means, the desire to deceive as an inherent part in the nature of the key characters – modern ministry workers such as B. Sumelekov, his uncle B. Arakbaev, B. Piyazov, and others. As to the British – Mr. Black and Mr. White – they strive to achieve results one way or another: experiencing ‘survival’ in an unfamiliar, exotic and deserted area (evening steppe), a trip to Almaty by train and, finally, a flight to Astana. And yet, despite all their adventures, they always try to save face, which allows the authors to make play with the stereotypes that appear among the British. The paper shows that the techniques of irony and contrast were used to create the work in a satirical-comic manner, which, in turn, demonstrates the difference between the national traditions of the Kazakhs and the British. The Kazakh national character is represented by an old shepherd who knows how to hold philosophical conversations in English, while the English are shown as the descendants of the valiant Templars. However, there is something in common between the former and the latter – this is the desire to adhere to the traditions of their people, a penchant for humor, joking at oneself, and tolerance.

The article studies the novels of The Cairo Trilogy written by the famous Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006, Nobel prize 1988), which is considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century and the prime work by the author.

The titles of the books Bayn al-Qasrayn, Qasr ash-Shawq, and as-Sukkariyya, which literary mean ‘Between two palaces’, ‘Palace of desire’, and ‘Sugar street’, are taken from the names of actual streets situated in the old quarters of Cairo. The novels follow the life of a Cairene family ‘Abd al-Gawwad living in a historic Cairo district; the titles point at the streets where the family’s houses are located. The principle of entitling the books may seem simple – by location. Regarding titles as a special type of texts, sometimes called frame texts, the article examines the following questions: is it true that the titles of the novels do not point at anything except geography? Do the texts meet the reader’s expectations created by the titles? The article concludes that the locations named in the titles not only highlight the national character of the novels but also prioritize the space of the family’s universe that survives a massive transformation during the first half of the 20th century. The novels show how the social changes ruin all the hierarchical family relations. The first title conveys the idea that the ‘Abd al-Gawwads ‘hang between’ two historic periods; the subsequent books show that the family does not cope very well, and there reigns corruption, illness, and lack of morality. From this point of view, on the one hand, the titles fulfil the reader’s expectations because the characters are shown to prefer ‘forbidden desire’ and alcohol to family life and honest business; on the other hand, there is a contradiction with the expectations created by the third title as this lifestyle does not bring any ‘sugar’ to their lives.

The article explores the boundaries of such a type of narrative as urban narrativity. Based on this approach, not only is a city an object of observation and description, but it also influences the creation of texts, being both the material for the plot and the narrative structure. The expression ‘figure of city’ is formed based on the well-developed concept of the ‘language’ of space (Antsiferov, Toporov, Certeau) and actualizes the rhetorical use of this language by the narrator to communicate with the readers. In this research paper, two contemporary prose works balancing between fiction and autofiction are in the focus of this ‘figure of city’ approach. In the case of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2016), the image of the city performs the function of a synecdoche, and the expression ‘lonely city’ is read as an unspoken ‘lonely me’, ‘lonely us’. In the case of the novel by Albert Spiazzatov (pseudonym of Eldar Sattarov) Losing Our Streets (2010), the city acts as a conceptual metaphor of the hero’s life and as a language for his self-reflection. The two examples demonstrate that thinking about a city is an understanding not only of a specific urban space but also of modern life itself. The figure of city can act both as an ontological metaphor and as a metalanguage of modern life.

The paper discusses methodological approaches to the study of the poetics of color in literary texts. To identify the methodology, the study consistently examines the process of the formation of ideas about color, takes into account and systematizes existing approaches to its analysis, in particular, those based on the peculiarities of the existence of color in culture and the semantics of color terms. The starting points for the analysis of the functions and role of color in a literary text are the frequency of use, color or color-light cores, and the grouping of color terms according to their symbolic or metaphorical meanings. Much attention is paid in the paper not only to literary works but also to works on the theory of color and color perception. The mechanisms of perceiving and associating color are of particular interest, since they make it possible to assess the universality of colored images in art. A study of the poetics of color must not be guided solely by interpretation of color meanings or personal associations. Significantly, the semantics of color, due to its cultural existence, does not limit the functions of color in a literary text, but complements the contextual meaning and role of color. In an analysis of a literary text, it is important to remember that the functions of color can be manifested on all the levels of the text. For a study of the poetics of color to be complete and systematic, it is necessary to take into account all the methods of observing color, and one of the tasks of the present research is to identify these methods. It is proposed to distinguish between the concepts of symbol and detail in relation to color. Color should be considered separately in relation to motifs, spatial and temporal organization, and subjective structure. Distinguishing the individual roles of color allows us to consider it as a significant element of the artistic world, complementing it and providing additional ways of understanding and interpreting.