The bear in the Russian ethnocultural code and language

The subject of the study is the concepts “Motherland” and “State”, their synonyms and associative images in Russian songs and Russian language, including Russian phraseological units, proverbs and sayings. The first concept is understood as a small homeland and a large homeland. Each person has his own small homeland, which is associated with place of birth, family, house, street, village, town, etc. The large homeland in a broad sense refers to the native country. The small homeland is part of the big homeland. These concepts play a role in the formation of Russian person’s national consciousness, spiritual values, worldview, character and personality. The purpose of this work is to clarify their meanings and differences in Russian language and in Russian people’s consciousness. Research methods include descriptive, associative, comparative methods, methods of synthesis and generalization, and semantic analysis. When analyzing and comparing the concepts “Motherland” and “State”, this work examines the images reflected in the texts of Russian songs about these concepts and language examples in Russian phraseological dictionaries. The conducted research shows that the term “Motherland”, associated with national history, culture and ethnic identity, has a spiritual psychological flavor. The term “State” with a social meaning is defined as a political, legal, economic form of organization of human society. This concept is associated with the images of “law”, “authority”, “army/armed force”, “citizen”, etc. Clarifying the differences in their semantics in Russian language helps speakers of other linguistic cultures to better understand their significance in Russian people’s history, culture and consciousness, their role and influence on the formation of Russian people’s national psychology and spiritual world. The study of these concepts has prospects for expanding foreign students' vocabulary, deeper understanding of the Russian language, culture, people, its spiritual world and their relationships and enriching their cultural, linguistic and personal experience.

INTRODUCTION. The article examines human nominations formed using animal names (zootropes) included by V.I. Dal in the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”. This aspect of the analysis of the work, unique in its composition and volume of vocabulary, has not previously been the subject of research. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that Dal’s dictionary presents a real, living language used in a vast territory of Russia. The purpose of the study is an analytical description of the animal names used to designate and characterize, evaluate a person in Dal’s dictionary (19th century), as well as identifying nominations preserved in the modern language, according to the lexicography of the 21st century.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material is zootropes contained in the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V.I. Dal: in the heading of the article, in the text and illustrations, as well as the latest version of the “Large Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” of 2014. Semantic, comparative, word-formation and pragmatic methods were used.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. About 90 units naming animals (beasts, birds, fish, insects, snakes and reptiles) were identified, which native speakers in the 19th century used to designate humans. 80 % of them are included in the corpus of zootropes of the modern Russian language and are recorded in modern lexicography of the 21st century. As the analysis shows, the names of animals are used to characterize a person’s appearance, internal qualities and behavior, to express a positive, sharp negative assessment and abuse.CONCLUSION. Zootropes of the modern Russian language constitute a significant layer of vocabulary that has absorbed traditional Russian ideas about their values. The most important condemned human qualities that are designated with the help of zootropes in the 19th and 21st centuries are greed, anger, untidiness and sloppiness, immodesty, and uncommunicativeness.

Aim. To establish differences in the category of modality in the Russian and French languages in comparative terms, to identify similarities and discrepancies in the use of linguistic means express­ing this category. Methodology. The main method of research is a comparative method that allows to identify similari­ties and differences in the linguistic means of this category in the French and Russian languages. The following methods were also used: continuous sampling method in the formation of the corpus of factual material, description and interpretation of the comparison results; analysis and synthesis of various points of view on the nature of the grammatical category of modality, and semantic analysis in the interpretation of factual material. Results. The discrepancies and coincidences of the compared languages in the grammatical cat­egory of modality, as well as the means of linguistic expression of this category have been identified and established. Modality as a linguistic and philosophical category inherent in human speech exists in all languages, including French and Russian. In French, the question of modality is controversial, defined by subjonctif forms / conditionnel forms. In Russian, modality is expressed by conditional­subjunctive sentences. Research implications . The analysis is significant for the comparative study of the two languages in the controversial issue of the grammatical category of modality and its linguistic expression. In French, there is a category of mood expressed by the paradigm of conditionnel forms / subjonctif forms. At the same time, strong arguments are given in favor of one or another point of view. The re­sults of the research of the article support the point of view on the grammatical category of modality in the French language expressed by subjonctif forms. The obtained research results are useful for students studying French and the program discipline “Comparative typology of French and Russian languages”.

The article is an attempt to show the key moments of the influence of French legal thought on selected legal institutions in Russia in the 19th century. The analysis was carried out based on the main thesis that quite liberal legal solutions of French origin were initially taken into account on the basis of the dynamically developing Francophone movement in the Russian Empire in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They were therefore accepted by the autocratic Russian emperors and the bureaucratic apparatus subordinate to them. However, over time, with the development of new social groups – the Russian intelligentsia – and the local culture, often based on traditional folk factors and concepts, the strength of the Francophone movement was less than before. For this reason, in the second half of the 19th century in autocratic Russia, legislation was quite often based on occidentalist French models, but clearly confronted with traditional solutions, most often affirmed by ukazs of Russian emperors.

The article presents a comprehensive theoretical overview of modality as a multifaceted linguistic phenomenon. Modality is considered as a means of expressing the speaker's attitude towards the content of the utterance, encompassing evaluations of reality, veracity, possibility, necessity, and desirability. The study synthesizes key interpretations of modality from both Russian and Western linguistic traditions, laying the groundwork for comparative analysis. The main focus is on the classification of modal meanings, including deontic, epistemic, dynamic, bulletin, and affective modalities. The object of research is the linguistic category of modality in language. The subject of the study includes specific classifications, means of expression, and interlanguage realizations of modality, with a particular emphasis on a comparative analysis of Russian, English, and German languages. Objectives: to systematize the theoretical foundations of modality based on the works of leading Russian and foreign linguists; to define and illustrate the main types of modal meanings; to identify and compare grammatical and lexical means of expressing modality in Russian, English, and German languages. The study employs a comparative-descriptive method, theoretical analysis and synthesis of existing linguistic literature, comparative analysis of linguistic data from Russian, English, and German languages, contextual and semantic analysis of utterance examples to illustrate modal meanings, and componential analysis to distinguish modality from other grammatical categories. The study concludes that modality is a crucial component of semantics and pragmatics, necessary for culturally sensitive communication. By comparing examples from English, German, and Russian languages, the article highlights the grammatical, lexical, and contextual strategies used in these languages and differentiates modality from related grammatical categories such as tense and aspect. The novelty of this research lies in its synthetic and comparative approach, which integrates various classification systems of domestic linguistics (for example, V. V. Vinogradov's subjective-objective modality, A. V. Bondarko's six meanings) with established typologies of Western linguistics (for example, categories proposed by linguists such as D. Crystal and R. T. Lakoff). By applying this unified structure to the analysis of three linguistically distinct languages (Russian, English, and German), the article offers a unified perspective on universal and linguistically specific features of modality.

Reviewed by: Moskva i Orda Donald Ostrowski Anton Anatol’evich Gorskii , Moskva i Orda [Moscow and the Horde]. Moscow: Nauka, 2000. 213 pp. ISBN 5-02-01-0202-4. The interpretive paradigm, or framework, that has most influenced scholarly understanding of Russian-steppe relations has been the Russian nationalist one, which emphasizes the destructiveness of the steppe pastoralists in relation to sedentary Russians. In this paradigm, the Mongols/Tatars are seen as rapacious belligerents and foreign oppressors from whom the Russians, with their center in Moscow, needed to liberate themselves. This view is grounded in the earlier anti-Tatar ideology of the Russian Orthodox Church, which described a "Tatar yoke" as having descended on the Russian principalities from 1238 to 1480. The Russian nationalist paradigm denies any influence of the Mongols /Tatars on the Russians; or, if it does see any influence, it is a negative and destructive one as foreign oppressors of the Great Russian ethnos. The author under review here comes from the Russian nationalist tradition, but he rejects the more extreme assertions of that paradigm. In this ambitious study, A. A. Gorskii focuses specifically on Moscow's relations with what he calls the Orda. He eschews the term "Golden Horde" as anachronistic and prefers the term that was used in the Russian sources of the time. This term might more properly be rendered into English as Ordu, the Turkic source word, which means camp, palace, or capital but was applied in Russian sources to the Qipchaq Khanate as a whole. Such attention to terminology is an improvement on the traditional Russian nationalist approach, which invariably calls the Qipchaq Khanate the "Golden Horde" (Zolotaia Orda) and pays little attention to the question of appropriateness of historical terms in relation to the primary sources. Gorskii's justification for writing this book is the absence of any specialized study that deals with Moscow-Ordu political relations from the 13th through the 15th centuries. Instead, he asserts that previous specialized studies have dealt only with the Kulikovo battle in 1380 and the encounter with Akhmed at the Ugra River in 1480 (4-5). He distinguishes what he calls "specialized studies" from other works that cover the topic but do so within the context of (a) Russian history as a whole (such as Karamzin, Solov´ev, and Platonov); (b) the history of Northeastern Rus´ (Presniakov, Fennell, Nitsche, and Crummey); (c) the history of the Ordu (Spuler, Grekov and Iakubovskii, and Safargaliev); or (d) Russian-Ordu relations and international relations in Eastern Europe (Nasonov, [End Page 383] Vernadsky, Silfen, Halperin, Hartog, Kniaz´kii, and Kargalov). This last distinction may be an overly fine one, because in the Russian nationalist paradigm, "Russia" of this period is considered to be more or less equivalent to Moscow, with very little attention paid to the other Rus´ principalities. It is to Gorskii's credit that he cites and actively engages in his text the works of non-"Russian" historians.1 Nonetheless, Gorskii's inability to free himself completely from the Russian nationalist framework is manifested in his treatment (or non-treatment) of certain topics. For example, he does not deal with the issue of possible cross-cultural political borrowings. The Russians are the Russians and the Tatars are the Tatars from the beginning of their interaction, so the possibility of one having any influence on the other or of the Rus´ princes seeing themselves as part of the Mongol empire is alien to his scheme. For him, the only question worth considering in this regard is why the Muscovite grand princes did not rebel against the Tatars sooner. He attributes the absence of rebellion to a "psychological barrier," a kind of blind spot, when it came to dealing with the Tatar khans. Gorskii resorts to a psychological explanation because the possibility that the Muscovite grand princes were not thinking in modern nationalist terms is not a consideration. But it is likely that the Muscovite grand princes identified less with the Russian peasants, townspeople, craftsmen, artisans, and merchants over whom they held sway than with their Tatar overlords. Their goal in getting out from under Tatar suzerainty was to emulate their suzerains more closely by becoming independent suzerains...

The subject of this research is the typological characteristics of declension system in the Russian and Armenian languages and their diachronic changes. The author compares the modern Armenian and Grabar (classical Armenian) language, as well as Old East Slavic and modern Russian language. The goal of this article is to determine typological peculiarities of grammatical case systems of the Russian and Armenian languages in their current state, taking into account the vectors of evolutionary development of these systems in the history of the two languages. Research methodology leans on the traditional concepts of morphological typology and systemic analysis of language types proposed by G. P. Melnikov. It is established that unlike the Russian language, the Armenian declension system contains certain agglutinative and analytical features. Emphasis is placed on the detailed analysis of these phenomena and explanation of their consistent nature. The acquired results are valuable for typological description of the Russian and Armenian languages, as well as for teaching these languages to non-native speakers. The presented materials broaden scientific representations on multifacetedness of development of fusional declension on the example of two quite different languages within the same language family.

The study relevance is caused by the special language situation in Belarus which is in close attention of modern linguists for several decades. Russian-Belarusian languages interaction is a special type of bilingualism which has specific features due to the common fate of the Belarusian and Russian people, genetic relationship, and language systems kinship. In Belarus the processes of generation and perception of the text in Russian language take place against a special psychological background of the Belarusian language system which creates the effect of the so-called unbalanced bilingualism. As a result one language system comes into contact with another causing interference. A serious problem in Belarus is the spontaneously russified version of the Belarusian language - Trasyanka. The goal of author is to identify the main problems of foreign students language adaptation in conditions of Belarusian-Russian bilingualism. Studying Russian in Belarus foreign students have to deal with texts in the Belarusian language, with colloquial speech and, of course, use words, terms, names in the Belarusian language. The author comes to the conclusion that foreign students do not experience any special communication difficulties from the Belarusian language unfamiliarity. The teacher of Russian as a foreign language, however, has a different, special task - to ensure a harmony among the culture of the language being studied (Russian), the culture of the host country (Belarus) and the national culture of the student.

Since the end of the twentieth century, linguistics has been laying the foundations for studying another language hypostasis, the spiritual one. However, the categories of spirituality and spirit have not been investigated in Russian language studies yet. This substantiates the relevance of studying the Bible heritage and spiritual space of the Russian word. The aim of the study is to show that the Russian language is the basis for the spirituality of the Russian people, which is formed and preserved in words, set expressions, proverbs with deep sacred meanings. These units fix the system of Bible values and guide the behavior of the people. The material of the study were words, set expressions, proverbs from dictionaries derived from the Bible or having sacred meanings, and some parts of the Bible. The author used descriptive, discursive, and linguistic-cultural analysis and system-semasiological interpretation of the language material. The study showed that the Russian language is the main and necessary source of spirituality for Russian people; it expresses and keeps key ideas about the God, religion, and church, which define intellectual and moral traits of Russian-speaking personality. The study reveals an important aspect of the communicative function of the Russian language, which is realized in prayers, requests to God, and in the sacred meanings of the Russian word as part of its linguistic semantics. The study proves that the Russian linguistic consciousness contains the basic religious and spiritual values and the behavior norms. The Russian language is permeated with biblical meanings so the theological-anthropocentric paradigm of scientific knowledge is prospective for Russian language studies.

The article describes the ideologeme “Russian people” and its use in the texts of fiction and documentary literature of the 19th century. The authors explored both the socio-political concept “'Russian people” and its verbalization in Russian. The research material included examples from the Russian National Corpus, which were analysed using corpus, content-analytical and cognitive methods. This research aims to identify and to characterise the con­cept “Russian people”. The authors argue that it was in the 19th century that the concept “Russian people” evolved into a term and the image of Russian people was mythologized. The authors concluded that the concept “Russian people” is composed of two parts — ‘ordinary people’ and ‘society’. The latter behaves in a fatherly way, taking upon itself the mission of enlightenment of ordinary people and their liberation. In the semantic field “Russian people” there are numerous semantic components directly related to the concept analysed: faith, faith­fulness, patience, tolerance, understanding, receptivity, openness, simple-mindedness, juve­nility, etc. The authors consider the moral and intellectual qualities of Russian people, which are dialectical and ambivalent. The authors explore these characteristics of Russian people from the standpoint of the dichotomy own vs. alien. The analysis shows that after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the image of Russian people undergoes significant changes under the in­fluence of social processes.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a comparative typological analysis of the means of expressing the category “Definiteness / Indefiniteness” in German, Tatar and Russian languages and, building on this analysis, to develop a system of exercises that allow to show the specifics of using this category in the compared languages. The relevance of the study is dictated by the practical and theoretical significance of the co-study of different structural languages at school in the process of forming a multilingual student‟s personality. The article analyses the possibilities of a comparative typological method of studying foreign and native languages. Based on this method, a comparative characteristic of the German, Russian and Tatar languages is given in terms of morphological and genealogical classifications. Despite the fact that these languages, according to the presented classifications, are not related, the positive transfer of knowledge and skills, as well as language interference in the co-study of these languages are of great importance. The author considers the category “Definiteness / Indefiniteness” as a functional semantic field having a polycentric structure and combining grammatical, lexical and syntactic means of expression of the category under study. In the absence of a grammatical marker (article in German), lexical means are widely used, it indicates the possibility of expressing the category “Definiteness / Indefiniteness,” especially in Russian and Tatar languages. Among the syntactic ways of expressing the category, the word order with its goal-communicative attitude is distinguished, as well as the intonation in the compared languages. This study contributes to a more effective teaching of German grammar in an audience whose native language is Tatar and (or) Russian. The practical result of the study is a set of exercises demonstrating the possibilities of learning the category “Definiteness / Indefiniteness” using a comparative typological approach.

This article aims to identify the formation and functioning patterns of term units developing on the basis of common vocabulary. Metaphor is the main mechanism of term formation based on commonly used words. The article discusses the units of the terminological system of computer science and cybernetics based on the material of the Russian and German languages. The research methods were descriptive and comparative methods, as well as methods of psycholinguistic experiments and statistical calculations. Metaphorical reinterpretation is based on associations and analogies associated with a specific image, which serves as a motive for the new meaning of the word-term.

The article is devoted to the problem of the Russian intelligentsia identity formation in the 21st century. The authors trace a historical path that the Russian intelligentsia has gone through. Russian philosophers of the 20th century rated this path as tragic, noting that the intelligentsia itself wrote its own history, having captured it in great cultural texts well known in Russia and in the world. The need to understand oneself, one’s purpose, to understand the peculiarity of the situation in Russia and the world is an expression of the intelligentsia’s self-consciousness. Cultural memory, allowing the intelligentsia to maintain its own integrity, plays a leading role in shaping the identity of the intelligentsia. It allows for its own integrity to be maintained. The Russian intelligentsia is a socio-cultural type, including the complex mix of ideas and values which has been shaped since the end of the 18th century in difficult historical conditions. From the beginning, the intelligentsia tried to solve the problem of Russian modernization through enlightening, initiating social changes and participating in them. The Russian intelligentsia formed a special character - psychological traits and behavior, opposite to the type of European intellectuals. Until now, the Russian intelligentsia argues about itself, becoming sometimes closer to European intellectuals, but affirming sometimes its singularity. Nevertheless, in modern Russia there is a widespread perception that the intelligentsia is being replaced by a class of intellectuals - professionals, experts, and public intellectuals which strive to influence the formation of public discourse and the discourse of power. In the course of post-Soviet transformations, the intelligentsia began to lose not only the role of public and political actor, but also the role of the moral elite. The consequences of this process are destructive for younger generations and society as a whole. The study conducted by the authors of the article shows that the discourse of intelligentsia is changing as well as the discourse about it, although the intelligentsia is being constructed in a process of permanent dispute about the past, present and future of Russia. At the same time, intellectual identity is being formed in this dispute. So, it would be wrong to perceive the Russian intelligentsia as an unchanging phenomenon. Its openness to cultural and social changes allows us to talk about the formation of the intelligentsia of the 21st century. The study also reveals that the attitudes towards the intelligentsia expressed by the young generation of educated Russians living in an open, global world, are changing. The new vision of the intelligentsia is similar to its European perception as an intellectual elite. At the same time, a desire of young Russians to turn to the values historically constituting the moral code of the Russian intelligentsia, is observed. Thus, it cannot be said that the intelligentsia has disappeared from Russian public life; instead, the intelligentsia identity is a cultural challenge for the younger generation of modern Russians.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nationality as an “ordering principle” became for the first time a significant factor for Russian imperial policy. Among the most thorny issues facing the imperial bureaucracy was the delimitation of the boundaries of the “Russian nation.” As is well known, St Petersburg never accepted either Ukrainians (at the time more often referred to as “Little Russians”) or Belarusians as separate nations. On the other hand, official Russia also did not deny the linguistic and cultural difference of these two groups entirely. Categories used in the 1897 census reflect this: under the category “mother tongue” (not surprisingly, no specific category of “nation” or “ethnicity” was included), those surveyed could respond “Great Russian,” “Little Russian,” or “Belarusian.” All three of these categories were then, however, subsumed into the larger category “Russian.” In a similar way, Russian officials never denied that Belarusians were in certain respects different from their brethren in central Russia. They did, however, indignantly reject the idea that these differences were so great as to exclude Belarusians from membership in the Russian nation.

The research deals with the problem of bilingualism and polylingualism in the aspect of intercultural communication in the conditions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in diachronic and synchronic aspects. Multilingualism, multiculturalism, intercultural communication has an ancient history in the republics of Central Asia, on the territory of which Arabic, Farsi, Russian functioned in different periods of history along with Turkic languages (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Karakalpak, etc.). Each of these languages in different epochs fulfilled the functions of the language of state documents, the language of education and science, and communication in the process of intercultural communication. Bilingualism and transcultural practices had three sides until the beginning of the 20th century: 1. Implementation of linguistic and intercultural communication in Arabic as a result of the adoption of Islam: introduction of Muslim religious concepts, principles, rules of behavior, culture of interpersonal and social communication, school education (in maktabs), education in madrasas into everyday life. 2. Implementation of linguistic and intercultural communication in Farsi due to the functioning of the Bukhara Emirate and the prevalence of Farsi in the spheres of education, fiction, science. 3. Realization of intra-state linguistic and intercultural communication in the Turkic language by the majority of the population. After 1917, with the formation of the USSR, the Russian language was actively introduced on the state ideological basis. The total introduction of the Russian language through the system of compulsory school education, in the system of science and culture has yielded its results: by 1990 Turkic-Russian bilingualism and biculturalism had covered the overwhelming majority of the population (up to 90%, in some regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - up to 100%). The varieties of polylingualism actively functioning are: Kazakh-Russian-Uzbek, Kazakh-Russian-Kirghiz, Uzbek-Russian-Tajik, Uzbek-Russian-Karakalpak, Karakalpak-Russian-Uzbek, Karakalpak-Uzbek, Karakalpak-Uzbek-Kazakh and others. At present, with the active entry of English into the education system, bilingualism and poly-lingualism with its participation are being formed: Kazakh-Russian-English, Uzbek-Russian-English, Uzbek-Russian-English and others. Varieties of bilingualism and polylingualism with the participation of English are characterized by localization in diplomacy, joint enterprises, international projects, etc. Before the arrival of the Russian language, people mainly became bilinguals in the conditions of natural functioning of bilingualism, and in the XX century - in the combination of natural non-native (Russian) language environment in Turkophone conditions with the system of school and university polylingual education. In the course of the work the comparative, intra-language comparison, deductive and inductive methods were used, which helped to determine the theoretical and practical significance of the topic of scientific research.