RUSSIAN ENGLISH IN THE WRITTEN DISCOURSE: FEATURES AND CHARACTERISTICS

The present study examined linguistic relativity in the domain of emotion terms. Exp. 1 showed that American English speakers use the word "jealous" to describe both situations involving envy and those involving jealousy, whereas Russian speakers describe emotions involved in the situations using the Russian terms revnuet and zaviduet in a mutually exclusive manner. Bilinguals performed according to the language they were tested in. In Experiment 2 we sought evidence for conceptual consequences of the difference in how emotion terms mapped onto situations for English and Russian speakers. In a non-linguistic triad sorting task, all subjects clearly distinguished jealousy situations from envy situations, but monolingual English speakers and bilinguals were more likely to see envy situations and jealousy situations as similar than Russian speakers. In a free sorting task, high agreement across all groups was shown in sorting jealousy, envy and control situations. However, native Russian speakers, in contrast to native English speakers, labeled the groups in a mutually-exclusive way. While providing some evidence for the weak view of linguistic relativity, overall the study shows that despite the difference in labeling the emotions of jealousy and envy, Russian speakers, English speakers and bilinguals are very similar in how they conceptualize emotionally-laden situations.

A computer text analysis of four cohesion devices in english discourse by native and nonnative writers

The article continues studying interconnected teaching of Russian language and culture in linguistic and сultural aspect of the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) from the perspective of communicative and active learning. The relevance of this study is associated with the need to develop a system of theoretical and practical recommendations on using cultural potential of language environment in teaching and learning RFL as part of communicative and active approach to teaching. The research attempts to develop the concept and content of a coursebook on linguocultural studies, aimed at extending knowledge of Russian culture and developing communicative competence of foreigners studying the Russian language. This is an important condition for linguocultural adaptation. The research was carried out on the basis of traditional folk culture realities, which most vividly reflect the peculiarities of national mentality and provide opportunities for both theoretical and practical cultural activities in teaching/learning RFL: decorative and applied art and folk crafts, traditional folk dolls, and cuisine. The methods of the research are analysis, generalization and forecasting. The research resulted in developing the concept of a coursebook on linguocultural studies and determining its content. The author makes conclusion about effectiveness of the communicative-activity approach in teaching and learning aimed at extending foreigners knowledge about Russian culture and Russian national mentality, forming their communicative competence and providing successful linguistic and cultural adaptation. The conclusion is based on the materials of a coursebook on linguistic and cultural studies for foreigners learning Russian.

This article considers the approach of the popular Russian émigré newsmagazine Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya [Illustrated Russia] to so-called preservationism — simply put, the tendency to preserve prerevolutionary Russian culture in exile. More specifically, this article studies preservationism in the everyday life of the Russian interwar diaspora. Due to its long run, broad scope, and large readership, the magazine is a unique and invaluable document, offering significant insight into the social and cultural life of Russian émigrés. In order to gain an understanding of preservationism in Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya, a close reading of the periodical will be conducted, centred around questions such as whether the magazine covered any aspects of prerevolutionary Russian culture at all, and, if so, which and how? Focusing on three key elements of Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya’s editorial content, this article demonstrates that preservationism in popular and everyday culture as presented in this periodical differs markedly from its high-culture counterpart (such as highbrow literature and visual arts, for example). What stands out in Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya’s approach is that prerevolutionary Russian life and culture are rarely covered and, more importantly, never truly glorified. Instead, coverage of the Russian émigré community itself makes up a central part of the magazine’s content. When it comes to preserving Russian culture and identity, Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya pleads for finding a middle ground between preserving the home culture and adapting to the host culture. In doing so, the magazine frequently stresses readers’ individual responsibility to seek connection with their Russian identity instead of relying on leading émigré figures and institutions.

English language has become a universal language to communicate with people worldwide in the era of globalisation as more global citizens take up English as a Second Language (ESL). Yet, ESL learners still face problems in becoming competent speakers of the English language which can impact their communication skills adversely in personal and professional settings. The use of Language learning strategies (LLS) among ESL learners can bring about proficient speaking skills and vice versa. This study aims to find out the extent of ESL learners' use of LLS in relation to their speaking skills. A survey research design was used and data was collected through an online survey questionnaire among Form 2 pupils from a rural Negeri Sembilan secondary school. The 15 close-ended questions adapted from Oxford, Cohen and Chi’s Language Strategy Use Survey were formulated to inquire about pupils’ use of English speaking learning strategies. The quantitative analysis of the questionnaire results revealed that most pupils never and seldom utilize speaking learning strategies when engaging in English discourse with exception of showing a significant use in the strategy of switching to their native language momentarily. This study of the aforementioned sample demonstrated that most adolescent ESL learners in Malaysian secondary schools use little to none English speaking skill learning strategies and use more of their native language to cope in English conversations. ESL policy makers, educators and researchers are needed to further encourage the ESL learners’ active use of LLS for speaking and eventually enhance their speaking skills. Recommendations were provided for future studies in consideration of English language educators and researchers.

After the annexation of the Crimea by Vladimir Putin’s Russia attempts at an ideological justification of Greater Russia’s role as a dominating power in Eastern Europe have acquired a new relevance. An important issue from this point of view is the relationship between Kievan Rus’ – traditionally considered the cradle of the [Rus-sian civilization – and the Grand Principality of Moscow that replaced it after the Mongol incur-sions. Russian identity narratives usually marginalize the current status of (the) Ukraine and stress its peripherality in the “Russian world”. In order to achieve this they employ both theo-logical, cultural and geopolitical arguments that sometimes appear to be at odds with each other. Moscow is both the center of the true (orthodox) Christian faith and the civilization of the Eura-sian geopolitical space. In the latter case the Russian capital rules a multi-religious empire. Eurasian ideologues like L.N. Gumiliov and particularly Alexander Dugin reject alternative, “Western” interpretation of Russian (and Ukrainian) history by pointing out that there exists an unbridgeable gap between the Western and the Russian (or Eurasian) civilization. According to them, Western scholars can never grasp the specificity of the Russian (Eurasian) historical devel-opment. It could be argued that this argument for a relativism along civilizational lines dimin-ishes the universal impact of Christianity which (that) in the Russian context loses much of its transcendent sense and becomes – instead – a cultural feature. On the other hand, though, the (half-conscious) culturalization of orthodox Christianity gives more weight to geopolitical arguments in favor of Moscow as the center of the Russian World (and Russia as the center of Eurasia). However, this does not mean that the pivotal role of Moscow as the residence of the All Russian Patriarchate, the “legitimate” successor to the ancient metropolis of Kievan Rus’, is not exploited, in order to discredit Ukraine’s ambitions of becoming an independent state.

The research aims to prove the assumption that the terminology of such an extraordinary socio-economic digital phenomenon as the cryptocurrency market is involved in the sphere of the Russian and English speakers’ metalanguage consciousness, and is subject to pronounced metalanguage reflection. Observation over "naive linguists" is a way to monitor lexical changes in both languages due to the emergence of the crypto market. Metalanguage reflection is understood here as the ability of an individual to reflect on the elements and patterns of language and speech: to observe the language, to notice new phenomena in it, to make generalizations, describe and explain the results of the observations. It has been shown that at present, both Russian and English speakers feel the need for clarification of the new terms and explicitly express this need. Analysis of the discourse on the Internet reveals a huge number of metalanguage comments in both Russian- and English-speaking segments of the Internet. A high degree of metaphoricity in the cryptocurrency language is noted. Another manifestation of metalanguage reflection is amateur lexicography. It was also found that professional cryptocurrency market participants feel the need for terminology standardization and are making attempts to do so.

The author of the article considers the interaction of traditional musical cultures in Russia from a historical perspective and a philosophical point of view. The cultural approach allows us to consider traditional musical culture as a multi­level system, the musical and cultural tradition as part of the system and as a multi­component model. The pedagogical approach allows to justify the feasibility of introducing this issue into the content of the university training of future musicians and teachers in order to understand by them the mechanism of functioning of traditional musical cultures and to use their knowledge in their subsequent professional musical activity. The author pays special attention to the analysis of the possibilities of the musical and cultural tradition as a social and cultural phenomenon and the nature of its interaction with foreign cultures. It is shown that the musical and cultural tradition as a means of consolidating different nationalities is an effective way to unite all peoples not only of Russia, but also beyond its borders.

This article explores the use of vague expressions in English spoken as a lingua franca in academic settings. The main focus is on the frequencies of general extenders (e.g. and so on), vague classifiers (e.g. some sort of), metadiscourse particles (e.g. so to say), and indefinite prepositional phrases (e.g. in a way). The aim of the study is to investigate how non-native speakers using English as a lingua franca employ and modify their repertoire of lexical vagueness in accordance with the speech event type and academic domain. Furthermore, the study also presents comparisons between the frequencies of vague expressions in lingua franca and native speaker data. The main sample is drawn from the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus and the findings are contrasted with a comparable data from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The findings show that, on the whole, lingua franca speakers employ vague expressions almost twice as frequently as native speakers, although the range of different expressions was found to be narrower in the lingua franca data. Vague expressions were most commonly found in dialogic speech events such as doctoral defense and seminar discussions. As regards academic domains, vague expressions were most often used in technology, while in humanities and social sciences their frequencies were lower.

The article focuses on the analysis of linguistic means of adapting the literary heritage of the 19th century by the Soviet cultural space using the example of Pushkin's discourse of the 1920s-1930s. At first glance, it seems that the interpretation of Pushkin's heritage was continuous in Russian culture throughout the centuries with the same semantics: the poet as a symbol of national culture. However, in Pushkin's discourse, there is a breakpoint that occurred in the post-revolutionary decade, during the breakdown of the entire cultural tradition in an attempt to establish a new proletarian culture. In order to set the vector for the development of Soviet culture, the Bolsheviks had to solve the cardinal question of their attitude to the literary heritage of the Russian Empire. The option of full assimilation of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage was unacceptable for the Bolsheviks. A complete refusal was also impossible since the Bolsheviks as a whole understood that it was difficult to ignore the age-old cultural tradition. As a result, the new regime, with its perception of the cultural tradition as “cultural baggage”, had to use ideological filters for this baggage. From this point of view, the most representative source is the ideological concepts of the history of the 19th century literature presented as a system in the Literary Encyclopedia in 11 volumes (1929-1939) and in the Small Soviet Encyclopedia (1928-1931), as well as the ways of communicating the concepts to the broad Soviet audience. Pushkin's Soviet discourse is the most indicative example of the changes that occurred in the Russian language in the post-revolutionary era when a version of the Russian language started obeying a new system of meanings and attributed to the text a meaning that was not originally implied or intended by the author. One of the instruments for adapting the pre-revolutionary cultural experience to the Soviet ideological space was the expansion of the semantic field of the key concepts democratic and revolutionary with the help of added context. The added context made any phenomenon of pre-revolutionary culture look “proletarian”, especially those ones which could justify continuity between the “Soviet present” and the “Russian past”. Also, this context divided the cultural tradition into “good past” and “bad past”. Moreover, it caused the emergence of oxymorons in the language that brought together very opposite ideas, such as, for example, “noble revolutionaries”. However, despite the internal inconsistency of Pushkin's Soviet discourse, as evidenced by the oxymoronic nature of its basic concepts, the aim of the “Sovietization” of Pushkin was successfully achieved through the purposeful use of linguistic means.

This article considers the acquisition of three English syntax–discourse interface constructions: Topicalization, Focus Fronting and Left Dislocation. We use data from Basque–Spanish bilinguals learning English as a third language (L3) as a test case for the Interface Hypothesis (IH, Sorace, 2011). The IH has made specific predictions about second language (L2) acquisition and such predictions can be extrapolated to L3 on the basis of interface delay explanations. Thirty contexts and embedded test sentences with and without pronouns were used; participants had to rate the acceptability of each audio stimulus sentence in the context on a seven-point scale. We tested Basque–Spanish bilinguals dominant in Basque (n = 23), Basque–Spanish bilinguals dominant in Spanish (n = 24), Spanish L2 English learners (n = 39) as well as native English speakers (n = 24). Findings provide evidence against current L3 acquisition models and potential arguments for both cumulative enhancement as well as cumulative inhibition as possible processes in L3 acquisition.

The subject of the study is the system of values of the past, represented in traditional Russian culture. The object of the research is the connection of the values of traditional culture with the structure of consciousness of modern Russian youth. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the study of the concept of "traditional culture", the analysis of its content, represented by the phenomenon of national unity, understanding the significance of this phenomenon in the minds of the inhabitants of the country. During the research, special attention was paid to a sociological survey of young people related to the actualization of the cultural, historical, patriotic meaning of the National Unity holiday, the attitude of the younger generation towards it, and the identification of values significant to it. An important role in the presented work is given to the comparative analysis of surveys of residents of the country and students, the characteristic of the basic foundations of the worldview in the structure of consciousness of older and younger generations, the methods that were used during the study are presented by: analysis of sources on the problem of determining the meaning of the concept of "traditional culture"; by the method of a written survey of students; by the method of comparative analysis of responses between data, represented by VTSIOM, and young people on the problem of national unity of society. The scientific novelty of the presented research is characterized by a comparative analysis of abstract sociological research carried out by VTSIOM with the specific results of a survey of young students of the Kostroma State Agricultural Academy. The results of the work show that at the present stage of development of Russian society there is a tendency to blur the clear ideas of the younger generation about the figurative and symbolic meaning of the spiritual and moral values of the people that define traditional culture. The main conclusion of the study is that young people generally do not recognize the value of social unity as an indicator of the integrity of the state, do not know the historical meaning of the National Unity holiday, do not consider traditional values (family, love of the Motherland, brotherhood of peoples) significant in modern reality, using the Internet space for communication, becomes dependent on gadgets which poses a real threat of loss of communication between generations.

The authors make a distinction between such concepts as ‘lower social class’ (‘lumpen-proletariat’), ‘criminal community’ and ‘cultural underground’, and identify significant differences between the lower social strata in traditional and modern societies. The single ‘lower social world’ of traditional societies had its own cults, culture and organization and was an opposite of the ‘upper social world’. The religious definition of its ritual impurity was the basis for discrimination and segregation of its members and social groups. In modern societies, the lower class disintegrates and cannot be considered a single social anti-system: its ‘fragments’ - the prison part of the criminal community, counter-cultural underground and forbidden sects - are not connected with each other; the upper privileged part of criminal communities (a system of patronages with horizontal and vertical social ties) became a part of the modern society elite. At the same time, the system of patron-client relations that invisibly permeates modern societies necessarily implies corruption, at least the ‘soft corruption’. The authors consider such a phenomenon as an ‘underground’ in modern societies defining it as countercultural groups consisting mainly of well-educated representatives of the middle-class. The article also describes the underground of the Soviet society before and after perestroika which cannot be defined as a lower class of the contemporary Russian society. In conclusion, the authors suggest that in the Russian culture there is a kind of refined image of the ‘social bottom’ that influenced scientific ideas about it and is based on the social representations of the lower social class in the traditional society.

Новая книга о влиянии Византии на русскую культуру: рецензия на монографию Г. В. Скотниковой «Византийский ассист: византийская художественная традиция и русская культура: история и теория» (Санкт-Петербург, 2018)

From time to time, there is a continuing polemics about the nature and destiny of Russian culture. Is it possible to speak of Russian culture as a homogeneous, unified whole or, as Yuri Lotman stated, history of Russian culture sees itself as a chain of explosions? Really, Russian culture has often been referred to as a culture of explosions, that is to say, of discontinuity and abrupt rifts. The question arises, can Russian culture be characterised as culture of discontinuity, or has there always been a solid kernel which continues to drive it forward, giving a common ground to the social being of the people? In the opinion of the author, it is possible to explain this phenomenon only in the context of Russian history. Every turn of Russian history was accompanied by a great cultural upheaval, and caused fierce cultural and historical debates, often with appeals and real actions to deny or re-write the past of country. As examples we can recall the drastic modernization turn to the West by Peter the Great or the post-revolution desire to do away with classical Russian literature at the dawn of Bolshevist power or the post-Soviet attempts to cross out the Soviet period in history and culture after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The very uniqueness of Russian history was, according to Yuri Lotman, «the everacting factor, which then spontaneously and unconsciously to the culture, openly and even emphatically determines the way of its development». The same phenomena can be observed in Russia today, when our culture is facing the complexities of the modern world, which are due to the ambiguous effects of globalization, technological changes in everyday life (so called digitalization), which leads to a significant reformatting the social consciousness and the degradation of many religious and ethic values. It seems that Russian society (and culture as its integral component) was again at a crossroads, faced at the turn of XX – XXI centuries with the threat of change of the civilizational vector of development, so the search for optimal forms of social life remains a pressing issue on the agenda. The author offers some reflections on the fate of culture in the context of the dramatic upheavals of the Russian history.