No 11(866) (2022)

The article is devoted to the analysis of verbal representations of the eyewitnesses’ emotions concerning significant events in the German history of the 20th century. The study is conducted on the material of German-language oral memories from the website www.zeitzeugen-portal.de which is a part of a state project aimed at forming collective memory. With the help of quantitative and contextual analysis, the authors explore ways of fixing such emotional states as fear, joy, sadness, and hope. As result, the events that caused these emotions are identified; the role of emotives in recording and broadcasting significant events in the history of Germany is emphasized.

Oronyms are of significant interest not only as toponymic units, but also as means of objectification of the category of literary space. This article discusses such text-forming functions of oronyms in the literary space of the Swiss Alpine (mountain) prose as markers and identifiers of space, cognitive tools for constructing a mental map of space, a reference point in the coordinate system of a fictional space, a source of background information and others. Many oronyms are symbolically loaded names, so that they can bring additional connotations to the text or become the basis of a language game.

The article analyses some ways of representation of recurrent gestures in Thomas Mann’s novel “The Buddenbrooks”. It is shown that the semiotic status of gesture influences the stability of combinations nominating gesture kinemes. In addition, textual functions of gesture descriptions, such as imitation of natural polymodal communication, creation of a character’s individual space, creation of a speech and literary portrait of a character are identified. Expanded gesture descriptions can be markers of literary direction, genre affiliation of a literary text and individual style of a writer.

The article deals with a range of issues related to the semantic, pragmatic and functional transformations of German terms that occur during or as a result of their mediatization. The research was conducted by methods of discourse-linguistic, contextual and corpus analysis. The material for the investigation included terms of socially significant special fields, dictionary articles and concordances. The semantic and pragmatic transformations of mediatized terms were identified.

This study is conducted in the paradigm of historical semantics and is devoted to studying the development of abstract meaning in lexical items in the Middle High German period (using the concept "tugent", a key concept in the sermon of that time, expressed by the corresponding lexical item and its derivatives as an example). The article demonstrates the interaction of external and internal linguistic factors, as well as the role of an individual (Meister Eckhart) in the process of lexical item meaning evolution and formation of abstract vocabulary typical of the German Middle Ages.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the socio-psychological impact of modern German satirical articles on the mass recipient, covering the initial stage of the development of the coronavirus pandemic in Germany (February to June 2020). The author presents the results of the analysis of satirical articles, characterized by verbally and non-verbally expressed manipulative and persuasive discursive practice. Linguistic mechanisms of the socio-psychological impact of satirical articles are also defined, objectified through the combined use of language and visualization tools.

The article deals with linguistic means of representing weather conditions in landscape descriptions in German. On the material of the works of classical and modern German-speaking writers using the method of linguo-stylistic and geopoetic analysis of the text it is found out that the cognitive mechanism of the linguistic representation of weather conditions in landscape descriptions is reification. The authors usually choose a static description as a compositional speech form.

The article is devoted to the theme of wandering in the creative activity of writer, traveller, war correspondent and later an émigré writer of the “first wave” Vas. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. Wandering as a phenomenon of Russian spiritual life has become widespread in literature, but from this point of view the writer’s heritage has not yet been classified as a whole, this factor determines the novelty of the present work. The stylistic features of Vas. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko’s work are noted, his perception is evaluated, the works in which the experience of wandering found the most vivid embodiment are analyzed.

The article deals with the problem of reception of the Gothic heritage of the Western European literature of the 18th century in the work of the modern British author R. D. Harris. As a result of the analysis, some specific features of the motives of mystery and spatial isolation inherited by the author from the classics of the genre were revealed, their dominant role in the plot organization of the text was determined, caused by the intellectual needs of the postmodern era, which defines the hero as a disoriented, skeptical personality.

The purpose of the article is to establish the content of the concept of Work-Life-Balance in German linguistic culture. The study is based on a comparison of definitions given by sociologists and data from an associative experiment conducted by the author in 2021 in the form of google questionnaires, as well as on a comparison of the associative fields of values Leben (life) and Arbeit (work). The results obtained showed that in the minds of German speakers there are no clear integrative features, and, accordingly, a clear idea of the concept under study. Work-Life-Balance is in the process of its formation as a value.