Vol 19, No 4 (44) (2024)

The article analyzes folk curses that have an emotional charge and relate to abusive language. Most often they are psychological or domestic in nature. Mostly, this kind of curse is pronounced unconsciously during a domestic quarrel or other conflict. They can be considered as a communicative, imperative and expletive formula. The purpose of the study is to analyze curses in which the speaker expresses dissatisfaction and indignation towards the listener. As a rule, they convey the feelings of the speaker or swearer and their attitude towards a certain situation or a specific person. The object of the study is curses presented in the folklore of Lezghins and Kumyks. Curses are found in the form of proverbial expressions, prose miniatures, and individual phrases at the heart of large works (most often in folk songs). We give a general idea of the functional and semantic aspects of curses. The article proves that curses are detailed figurative statements of negative content. This genre of folklore has a great practical value. The curses are based on a person’s faith in the magical component of the word. The article indicates that the distinctive features of curses are semantic content, emotional richness and color. The authors focus on formulaic curse expressions using the imperative form of the verb, where the focus is on the intended recipient. The work attempts to present some models arising from culturally specific characteristics. To simplify the qualitative interpretation of the material, we divided the texts of curses into various groups based on their relationship to different spheres of life. Thematic features of verbal formulas are distributed depending on the addressee. 

The article deals with the problem of the intradiscursive variability of the speech genre of the abstract. The article aims to identify the variability of the manifestation of the author's principle in the verbal genre of abstract functioning in academic discourse. 38 Russian-language abstracts to linguistic academic articles published in the journal “Genres of Speech” in 2023 and 34 Russian-language abstracts to biological academic articles published in the “Journal of General Biology” in 2022 were selected as the base of the study. The main research methods were general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, comparison, juxtaposition, content analysis, statistical analysis), as well as methods of complex linguistic research – lexico-semantic, component, grammatical, discursive, stylistic, linguistic and pragmatic analyses. It was revealed that the pronouns “we” and “our” (in 13 % of linguistic and 21 % of biological annotations) and the self-designation “author” (in 11 % of linguistic and 3 % of biological abstracts) are used in abstracts as explicit markers of the authorʼs presence. Biologists are more actively using indirect designation through pronouns to emphasize personal contribution to solving a scientific problem and present results reflecting new knowledge. There are no differences in the use of implicit authorization tools (passive and impersonal constructions) in the abstracts belonging to the humanitarian and natural science discourse. To express an evaluative attitude towards the components of an epistemic situation, qualitative adjectives are used in the abstracts of both scientific directions, but in linguistic abstracts the set of adjectives is much richer. It was found that in the abstracts of natural science discourse the strengthening of evaluation using qualitative adverbs is more common (50 %) than in linguistic abstracts (29 %), as well as the weakening of evaluation – 32 % and 10 %, respectively. This indicates the desire of the linguistic authors to be more accurate and selective in expressing the strengthening or weakening of the assessment and, if possible, to avoid such speech strategies. Ii is concluded that the variability of the authorʼs presence in the verbal genre of abstract, functioning in academic discourse, is due to differences in research approaches, scientific tradition and the dissimilarity of the worldview of scientists.

Nowadays some experts call the multimedia longread the heir of the traditional journalistic genres. The longread successfully combines texts, illustrations, video materials and other elements aimed to attract the reader and holding their attention. The complicated longread in the Internet media is opposed to the short and simple shortread which occupies the main place in the information flow of modern people. The experts are alarming about the declining interest in reading long texts (primarily books) among young people. That is why it is becoming necessary to study the attitude to longreads among this age group of Russians. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 121 students of Russian universities, who measured the length of the texts they read in the Internet media during one week. The results of the survey revealed that 67% of the respondents do read longreads during the week. The survey also revealed two main reasons that prompted the interviewees to read them: significant motivation (educational process or first job compelled young people to look for answers in texts) and the attractiveness of articles written so well that reading them was not difficult or boring for this age group. At the same time, the main reasons for rejection were identified as being related to the quality of the texts themselves (vague wording, unclear structure), as well as inconvenient formatting (young people prefer to read texts via mobile devices).