The relevance of the study stems from the “visual turn” in political and media communication, where images in the formats of memes and cartoons have become dominant tools for aggregating and constructing political meanings. They offer instantly recognizable cognitive frames for interpreting complex geopolitical processes, such as the confrontation of the collective West with Russia and China. The historical memory of the Cold War serves as a key semiotic resource; however, the specific mechanisms of its visual reactivation, semiotic adaptation, and ideological reworking in digital discourse remain understudied. The aim of the article is to conduct a multi-level analysis of the specifics of the representation and functional load of the COLD WAR concept in visual English-language political discourse. The empirical material comprises a specially compiled corpus of approximately 150 Internet memes and political cartoons that emerged between 2020 and 2025, selected from social networks and digital media. The methodological foundation is an interdisciplinary synthesis, including critical visual analysis, semiotics, intertextuality theory, the framing approach, and speech act theory. The study established that the COLD WAR concept functions as a dynamic cognitive frame whose slots are filled with current content (modern leaders, digital and economic methods of confrontation). This allows for reducing the complexity of a multipolar world to a bipolar model. A stable set of visual patterns was identified: archetypes of nuclear threat (“Doomsday Clock”), strategies of historical parallels, adaptation of classical metaphors (“Iron Curtain”), and the new semantics of technological confrontation. The dominant pragmatic functions are satire and irony (serving both for criticism and for trivializing the threat) and mobilization through the construction of binary “us vs. them” oppositions. An asymmetry in representation was found: the image of Russia is built on allusions to the USSR, while the image of China is futuristic and technocratic. The visual discourse plays not a reflective, but a constitutive role, actively participating in the production and naturalization of the narrative about a “new cold war” through the manipulation of collective memory. This makes it a key field of contemporary symbolic battles.

This article examines the strategic role of Anglicisms in constructing the official discourse of German feminist policy in the context of the formation of a new ideological agenda and the institutionalization of political doctrines in the 2020s. The study aims to identify a correlation between the intensity of English borrowings usage in key program documents and the phases of the feminist policy development in the Federal Republic of Germany. The empirical basis comprises two strategic texts – the guidelines for feminist foreign policy and the concept of feminist development policy, elaborated by federal ministries under the leadership of female politicians Annalena Baerbock and Svenja Schulze when they were in office. The hypothesis put forward in the article is that high frequency, ideological marking, and concentrated presence of unadapted and hybrid Anglicisms in the considered documents indicate the borrowed nature of the doctrine in question, caused by the conceptual transfer and reproduction of Anglo-Saxon political models. The methodological framework includes terminological and definitional analysis, functional-semantic classification of Anglicisms and their hybrid derivatives, contextual analysis of their pragmatic potential in various communicative situations, as well as critical discourse analysis, necessary for interpreting Anglicisms as instruments of power reproduction, legitimation of a new political course, and construction of transnational political identity. The results demonstrate that Anglicisms perform multiple functions: conceptual import, global synchronization, technocratic rationalization, and symbolic marking of Germany’s belonging to the community of progressive states. Particular attention is paid to the institutional codification of the conceptual apparatus through the inclusion of glossaries in program documents, which is viewed as a deliberate discursive strategy for managing interpretations and strengthening state narrative hegemony. The conclusion drawn is that “global English” in the twenty-first century functions as a donor language for constructing national political ideologies, and German feminist policy serves as a telling example of the transformation of international discourse into a national political instrument. 

This article is devoted to the discussion of the boundaries of applicability of the detailed classification of topic constructions developed in generative grammar to the linguistic facts of the Portuguese and French on various synchronous sections of their history. It is assumed that the results of the study will be relevant for most Romance languages. The article reviews both scientific research in which the principles of classification are directly explored, and works that are limited exclusively to the analysis of language material which use certain nomenclature. The purpose of the review is to identify the optimal approach to classifying Romance topic labeling strategies. The most common classification is based on the opposition of the topicalization and the left dislocation with further division into subtypes: hanging topic left dislocation, clitic left dislocation, English type topicalization, V2 topicalization, “wild” topicalization. Differentiation is carried out according to various criteria, including the presence of a resumptive element, the nature of the resumptive element, the preservation of the case, the position of the marked topic relative to the boundaries of the clause. The experience of researchers in Portuguese and French shows that factors such as the absence of grammatical case, the pro-drop, the free ellipsis of the object of transitive verbs in some cases and the dubious status of certain pronouns can make it difficult to distinguish between these subtypes. Generative criteria also turn out to be untenable, since outwardly similar constructions behave differently in different languages. Based on the facts presented, it is concluded that the detailed classification is untenable in relation to Romance languages, since the vast majority of language examples are technically impossible to classify as a specific subtype. However, the possibility of a basic division into the construction of the left dislocation (with resumption) and topicalization (without resumption) in French and Portuguese is invariably present. 

Public media discourse is the most important communicative environment in modern society. The processes taking place within it are most clearly manifested in the genre of portrait interviews, the purpose of which is to present a personality through deep interaction and the construction of a public image. Achieving this goal is possible in a specially constructed communicative environment based on respect for personal boundaries and the principles of harmonious interaction. This approach corresponds to the concept of communication ecology, which, however, has not yet been formed as a coherent theory. Its principles are derived in the article through a synthesis of a number of psychological and linguistic theories that focus on harmonious interaction.

The analysis of Spanish portrait interviews reveals a culturally specific paradox: systematic violations of the principles of communication ecology (provocation, manipulation, pressure) do not lead to communication failure, but are a distinctive feature of the genre.

The aim of this article is to identify and describe the strategies and tactics of such violations in the speech behaviour of Spanish interviewers and to determine their pragmatic specificity in Spanish linguistic culture. The study is based on the hypothesis that these violations are not a communicative failure, but a culturally conditioned mechanism that serves the deeper purpose of the genre – to create a vivid public “portrait” of a person.

The work applies pragmalinguistic analysis, implemented within a two-level model. At the first level, based on a synthesis of psychological and linguistic approaches, deviations from the principles of ecological communication are identified. At the second, interpretative level, the concept of alterocentricity in the Spanish language (W. Bainehauer), the model of communication as a “joint dance” (U. Maturana) and existential philosophy (J. Ortega y Gasset) are used to explain these deviations.

It has been established that strategies and tactics for disrupting the ecology of communication are used as a tool for engaging the interlocutor in dialogue, testing their personality and self-disclosure.

The conclusions are important for the theory of intercultural communication and pragmatics, as they demonstrate the cultural conditioning of communicative norms and contribute to the understanding of the specifics of Spanish media discourse.

The purpose of this article is to identify the cognitive semantic mechanisms of the actualization of the phenomenon of affectivity in Japanese indirect passive voice and to determine the factors influencing its interpretation from the perspective of the patient’s subjective perception of harm. The research is based on the semantic-pragmatic method to identify the meanings and functions of the indirect affective passive in comparison with the direct passive, as well as to determine the pragmatic conditions of their use. Corpora analysis methods with elements of computational analysis of language data were used for the selection of material, and cognitive analysis was applied to interpret the empirical data and to establish universal conditions for the allowability of usage of the indirect affective passive. In this paper, the phenomenon of affectivity is examined for the first time within the framework of cognitive grammar, based on R. Langacker’s Reference Point Construction and Control Cycle models, which make possible to explain the internal cognitive foundations of the semantic and pragmatic permissibility of the indirect passive in Japanese. The obtained results demonstrate that affectivity is not a universal characteristic of Japanese passive constructions but rather manifests itself in situations of low agentive semantics, when the patient loses control over a situation or object because of the agent’s action, causing a state of internal tension and a sense of loss. Attention is paid to the role of the agentive characteristic of animacy in the semantic structure of passive-voice utterances. The analysis of a set of examples from Japanese national corpora, as well as from classical and modern Japanese literature, reveals that affective passive constructions allow for the presence of an inanimate agent and patient remote from the prototype, which is non-canonical for the Japanese passive, imposing strict restrictions on the inanimate nature of the central participants. Ultimately, affectivity is defined as a state of discomfort arising from the patient’s unrealized desire to control a situation related to a goal. It is established that the key condition for the emergence of affective meaning is the presence of a “control submission” relationship and the patient’s desire to control the situation, which is one of the key characteristics of both the participants themselves and the situation. The study’s results clarify the cognitive nature of affectivity and contribute to the development of a cognitive-semantic description of the Japanese passive voice, possessing theoretical and practical significance for further research in linguistics and linguodidactics.

The article focuses on the translation of military and journalistic texts from German into Russian based on materials taken from the channels ZDF, Österreichisches Bundesheer, and WELT and analyzed within the framework of the denotative model. The author attempts to transpose the principles of this approach to the sphere of military publicistic discourse. The current international situation draws the author’s attention to the necessity of revisiting the issues of modelling the translation process that were formulated in the works of V.N. Komissarov, and applying them specifically to military journalistic texts. The article also makes use of studies by prominent Russian and foreign scholars such as N.S. Avtonomova, M.Ya. Tsvilling, G.M. Strelkovsky, A.D. Schweitzer, S.D. Shelov, J.C. Catford, J. Albrecht, G. Bayer-Hohenwarter, and W. Koller. For a long time, translation studies have adhered to two stereotypical assumptions: (a) that the translator’s creativity is more characteristic of literary translation, and (b) that the translation of specialized texts is reduced exclusively to the problem of rendering terms. In this article, the author attempts to demonstrate the opposite, since units of general vocabulary can acquire terminological load as a result of transformations in their semasiological properties, which compels the translator to refer back to the real-world situation. The study also touches upon the influence of regional variants of the national standard language as a factor that determines the choice of an adequate translation equivalent. The aim of the research is to identify the factors affecting the translator’s decision-making when working with military and publicistic texts. To achieve this goal, the author employs such methods as analysis and synthesis of scholarly literature on translation theory, the denotative approach, componential analysis, and distributional analysis. The research establishes that the optimal translation strategies for such texts include functionally equivalent substitutions, generalization and/or specification, as well as inter-hyponymic translation. The article may be of interest to philologists, linguists, translators, students and postgraduates, as well as teachers of German and translation.

El propósito de este artículo es hacer una clasificación periódica de las novelas del escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez. Para lograr este objetivo, se utilizan métodos cuantitativos de prestigio que han demostrado su fiabilidad en estudios estilísticos. Se utiliza el método Delta, introducido por J. Burrows, basado en el cálculo de la distancia intertextual. Se considera principalmente el vocabulario funcional más frecuente. El método analiza la distribución del vocabulario más frecuente. Para cada texto del corpus analizado, se toma un número determinado de las palabras más frecuentes y se comparan sus frecuencias, representadas como puntuaciones z, que muestran la dispersión de los valores con respecto a la media. La medida Delta es la suma de las diferencias absolutas entre las puntuaciones z de los dos textos comparados, dividida por el número de palabras. Además, se utilizan modificaciones del método: Cosine Delta y Eder’s Delta. Como resultado, se estableció que la obra novelística de García Márquez se divide en varios períodos distintos. El primer período: décadas de 1950-1960, Hojarasca, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, Mala hora. El segundo período: desde Cien años de soledad hasta mediados de la década de 1990. Según el Delta Clásico y Eder’s Delta, un subgrupo compuesto por dos textos del siglo XXI, Memorias de mis putas tristes y En agosto nos vemos, se distingue dentro del segundo período. Según el Cosine Delta, Del amor y otros demonios también pertenece a este grupo de textos. Esta clasificación es plenamente coherente con los datos de los estudios históricos y literarios tradicionales, complementando y aclarando los datos existentes con los medios del análisis cuantitativo objetivo.

This article focuses on the ways of representing metaphorical transfers and the features of metaphor formation. The purpose of this study is to identify these mechanisms for temporal metaphors in Italian fiction. In accordance with the conceptual metaphor theory the ways of metaphorical representation of the temporal concepts are considered using the material of Dino Buzzati’s novels and short stories. The article describes the main metaphorical models in the texts of the Italian writer, identifies source domains and features underlying metaphorical transfer, and describes the semantics and syntax of metaphorical expressions, it also outlines the methods by which the described metaphors were transformed from conventional ones. At the first stage, the research procedure included the selection of contexts for the metaphorical representation of the concept of “time” (only verbal and phrase metaphors were considered); source domains were identified using the method of component analysis, and then combined into metaphorical models through systematization; the tools and methods for transforming conventional metaphors into author’s metaphors were described using structural and semantic analysis methods. The scientific novelty of this study is determined by the selected material, as the specifics of Dino Buzzati’s authorial conceptosphere are analyzed for the first time. The study establishes the closeness of the defined conceptual metaphors to archetypal ideas about time, since the most productive models in the studied texts are “time is a moving object,” “time is a natural phenomenon,” “time is a being,” and “time is a resource.” The semantic feature underlying the transfer can belong to both the semantic core and the periphery of the concept serving as the source domain. Linguistic representations of the metaphorical models in the texts are based on methods of extension, elaboration, and combining of conventional metaphors.

Madhesi Dalit women constitute one of the most socio-economically disadvantaged and structurally marginalized groups in Nepal. Situated at the intersection of caste, gender, regional location, and linguistic identity, their access to education remains profoundly constrained. This qualitative study examines the complex barriers and enabling factors shaping the educational experiences of Madhesi Dalit women in the districts of Siraha, Mahottari, Bara, Parsa, and Rautahat in Madhes Province. Drawing on life history interviews with Madhesi Dalit women enrolled in higher education, conducted via snowball sampling, the study is theoretically informed by Bourdieu’s concepts of linguistic capital and symbolic power. The findings highlight that language politics is central to reproducing educational exclusion. The dominance of Nepali in curricula and classroom instruction alienates students whose mother tongues are Maithili, Bhojpuri, or Awadhi, reinforcing hill-centric cultural norms within the education system. Participants reported significant academic and emotional struggles arising from the linguistic disjuncture between home and school, creating a dual burden of language acquisition and cultural adaptation. Nepali-dominant instruction functions not merely as a pedagogical practice but as a mechanism of symbolic exclusion that silences participation and undermines confidence. Linguistic marginalization is compounded by caste-based discrimination, gendered norms, early marriage, domestic labor, and economic insecurity, collectively limiting access to higher education. At the same time, the narratives reveal resilience and agency: women mobilized support through peers, teachers, family encouragement, and Dalit organizations, and some strategically accumulated dominant linguistic capital by mastering Nepali, transforming exclusion into empowerment. These findings underscore the urgent need for inclusive multilingual education policies, stronger institutional mechanisms, and structural reforms to challenge entrenched caste–gender–language hierarchies in Nepal’s education system.