The article examines the phenomenon of native-speakerism in English language teaching and its perception by Russian students. The relevance of the study is determined by globalization, the transformation of English into a lingua franca, and an ideology that considers native-speaking teachers more competent than non-native colleagues. The theoretical framework of the paper is based on Western critiques of native-speakerism and the analysis of the concepts of “native speaker” and “nositel’ yazyka” in Russian academic discourse. The novelty of the study lies in its empirical focus: to the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey-based investigation of Russian students’ perceptions of na tive-speaking versus non-native-speaking teachers of English, conducted across multiple educational formats. The empirical material consists of survey data from 67 Russian university students and learners of English in other educational formats (private tutoring, language schools, online courses). The questionnaire included closed- and open-ended questions about perceived strengths of native-speak ing and non-native-speaking teachers. The data were processed using quantitative (percentage calculation) and qualitative (thematic coding) methods. The findings reveal a transitional pattern of learners’ perception. Most respondents agree that a native speaker is better at teaching conversational skills, yet they do not consider the teacher’s origin a decisive factor and choose a teacher depending on their learning goals. Furthermore, over 80% of respondents value the ability of local (non-native-speaking) teachers to understand students’ difficulties and to explain the structure of the English language more effectively. Differences in perception emerge depending on the educational context: in language schools the image of the native speaker is more prominent than at universities. The article concludes that the rigid “native vs. non-native” hierarchy is gradually weakening, giving way to a functional, competence-based model of assessing teacher qualifications.

The relevance of this research is determined by the need to understand the phenomenon of information condensation in modern communication, which is characterized by the tendency towards linguistic economy, hybridization of textual forms, and the increasing role of non-verbal codes. In the context of the information society, the question of how language and culture bearers achieve mutual understanding by objectifying only a portion of relevant information while activating the rest implicitly becomes particularly significant. The author proposes to consider information condensation as one of the key cognitive and nominative strategies, consciously or intuitively chosen by subjects of com munication. The study material comprises texts of various types in Russian and German. The methodology includes a comprehensive linguistic analysis combining traditional and modern techniques for studying multi-level linguistic means, taking into account text-grammatical, semiological, functional, and intentional aspects of textual organization. The study substantiates that information condensation is implemented at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels and is achieved by altering the relationship between objectified and non-objectified but activated and co-activated information. The main factors influenc ing the choice of condensation strategy are the nature of the communicative task, the characteristics of the subjects’ personal and collective identity, the cultural environment specificity, and current social dispositives. It is demonstrated that condensation can act both as an independent strategy and as an auxiliary technique for optimizing other types of strategies. Information condensation is described from two complementary perspectives: as a relatively autonomous cognitive and nominative strategy consciously chosen by the subject and as a technique employed to optimize other types of cognitive, nominative, and communicative strategies. The study enumerates the factors that positively and/or negatively influence the realization of information condensation in communication. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between heterogeneous, heterosubstrate, and heterochronic knowledge about the world and knowledge that is not explicitly objectified but is activated and co-activated by the very means used to convey information about the world. The author concludes that information condensation is an effective mechanism for adapting linguistic means to changing communicative conditions. Its result is the restructuring of the information flow, increased content density with minimal formal expression, and optimization of interaction between communication participants. Information condensation is an integral characteristic of modern cultural and textual knowledge transfer, contributing to communicative effectiveness and to the enrichment of the repertoire of cognitive and nominative strategies available to language users.

In recent decades, semantic studies have occupied a prominent place in modern linguistics, particularly within the typological and comparative paradigm. Against this background, the present study examines the lexical-semantic field (LSF) “time” and the principles of its structural organization in three typologically distinct languages: Russian (infection-synthetic), English (analytic and weakly inflectional), and Ingush (inflectional-agglutinative). linguocultures. The scientific novelty of the research lies in its comprehensive comparative analysis of the LSF “time” based on nominative-accusative (Russian and English) and ergative (Ingush) languages. The empirical material includes data obtained from explanatory, etymological, synonymic, and antonymic dictionaries, as well as literary texts in the three analyzed languages used as illustrative material. The methodological framework combines theo retical and empirical methods of analysis, synthesis, classification, systematization, and generalization with elements of quantitative analysis, alongside functional-semantic and comparative approaches. The study resulted in the compilation of a representative corpus comprising approximately 500 lexical-semantic units with temporal meaning and over 30 contextual examples drawn from three typolog ically different languages. The findings demonstrate that the LSF “time” in Russian, English, and Ingush possesses a nuclear–central–peripheral organization, while the degree of its structural complexity and lexical density varies depending on the typological characteristics of each language. Such variation is determined by the interaction between universal cognitive mechanisms and language-specific typological features. In Russian, this is reflected in the predominance of inflectional forms contributing to grammatical integration and functional-semantic differentiation; in English, in the dominance of lexical and syntactic means leading to extensive lexical specification and synonymic variability; and in Ingush, in the interaction of inflectional and agglutinative features manifested in derivational transparency, morphemic motivation, and high word-formative productivity.

This article conducts a cognitive-discursive analysis of American political discourse, identifying archetypal metaphors and classifying them into five types of speech markers. This article aims to demonstrate how archetypal metaphors structure political reality, fulfilling cognitive and emotional functions and reflecting the political strategies of leaders. The aim of the study was to identify and systematize archetypal metaphors in American political discourse based on speech markers that enable the correlation of metaphorical constructions with specific communicative situations arising from the content of political strategies and the goals pursued by politicians. The study’s hypothesis is that archetypal metaphors are not random stylistic embellishments of speech, but rather perform cognitive and emotional functions, structuring the perception of political reality. To achieve the research goal and confirm this hypothesis, the article utilized a cognitive-semantic analysis of metaphorical constructions; a discourse analysis of speech situations (inaugural speeches, crisis addresses, election campaigns, critical publications); a comparative analysis of the communication strategies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump; and a lexical-semantic interpretation of archetypal images (path, home, roots, battle, wounds, phoenix, shield, etc.).The research methodology relies on a cognitive-discursive approach, which views metaphor as a tool for conceptualizing political reality. Within this approach, five types of speech markers were identified: evaluative, explanatory, concealing, culturally referential, and synthetic. During the study, each marker was correlated with speech situations, which allowed us to identify patterns in the use of archetypal metaphors in political discourse. A cognitive-discourse analysis revealed that archetypal metaphors in American political discourse serve not only a stylistic but also a conceptual function, structuring the perception of political reality. The identification of five types of speech markers (evaluative, explanatory, concealing, culturally referential, and synthetic) allowed us to systematize metaphorical constructions and relate them to specific speech situations. The author’s approach to analyzing archetypal metaphors in political discourse is promising, as it identifies the cognitive and emotional functions of metaphor and links them to genre and communicative features. The promise of this method lies in its universality: it is applicable not only to American political discourse but also to the study of metaphor transformations in other national traditions and media contexts.

The relevance of the study lies in the challenges of literary translation and the phenomenon of untranslatability in intercultural communication, as well as in the importance of B. Pérez Galdós’s oeuvre and the need for its adequate reception by Russian readers. The research aims to identify and assess strategies for rendering phraseological units in Galdós’s novel Tristana, focusing on the preservation of expressiveness, cultural connotations, and the author’s intent, as well as to determine the semantic and pragmatic losses incurred when an idiom is replaced with an equivalent, interpreted lexically, or omitted. The study applies comparative, component distributional, and contextual analysis methods alongside a classification of translation transformations. Analysis reveals three common transformation types in translation practice: substitution with an approximately equivalent expression; substitution that distorts semantic, stylistic, and pragmatic features; and omission due to untranslat ability and the impossibility of transferring the unit into another cultural and linguistic environment. These transformations cause substantial losses: they weaken the text’s cognitive density, reduce expressiveness and emotional tone, neutralise culturally specific imagery, distort the author’s intentions and subtext, diminish the figurative richness of characters’ speech, and lead to axiological shifts — all impairing the Russian reader’s perception of the novel. The findings are relevant to literary translation practice and may inform a new Russian translation of the novel. Further research may focus on the linguoculturological analysis of the phraseological worldview in 19th century Spanish fiction and on the cognitive functions of phraseology within it.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems achieve remarkable fluency for high-resource languages, yet they systematically fail when confronted with literary texts from low-resource languages, where cultural embeddedness and stylistic complexity exceed the capacity of statistically driven models. Kurdish presents a particularly demanding case for machine translation research owing to its pronounced dialectal variation, agglutinative morphology, and the scarcity of parallel literary corpora available for training. This paper investigates how contemporary NMT systems handle Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) drawn from Kurdish literary prose and what the patterns of their failure reveal about the architectural and ideological assumptions embedded within these systems. Using Bachtyar Ali’s novel The Last Pomegranate Tree as its primary material, the study analyzes 15 CSIs spanning proper names, social roles, material culture, food, clothing, ritual objects, religious figures, and social concepts, comparing four translation agents: a professional human translator, Google Translate, Microsoft Bing Translator, and a prompted Large Language Model (Claude 3 Opus, instructed to foreignize). Each output was evaluated for Fidelity (cultural accuracy) and Fluency (linguistic naturalness) on a 1-5 scale and coded according to Venuti’s (1995) domestication/foreignization framework. The results reveal a stark strategic opposition between human and machine translation. The human translator and the prompted AI system applied preserving strategies, chiefly foreignization with explanatory glosses, in 100% of cases, whereas Google Translate defaulted to erasing, domesticating strategies in 86.7% of cases and Microsoft Bing in 73.3%, producing an effectiveness gap of 30 to 50 percentage points. A key finding is what may be termed the invisibility of cultural erasure: commercial MT systems generate fluent, grammatically correct English that conceals the systematic replacement of culturally specific content with generic, impoverished approximations. The study concludes that MT failure here is not merely technical but architectural and ideological: standard NMT systems are structurally biased toward domestication, reproducing cultural marginalization for low-resource languages such as Kurdish. The alignment achieved by the explicitly prompted AI system suggests that this bias is a design default rather than a technological ceiling. The paper calls for culturally annotated corpora, revised evaluation metrics sensitive to cultural authenticity, and human-AI collaborative frameworks for literary translation.

The aim of this study is to examine the functional and syntactic features of expressive syntax constructions used in the texts taken from popular science media discourse. The relevance of the research is determined by the special role of syntactic means in organizing utterances to achieve the maximum level of impact on the reader’s consciousness. Syntactic constructions are employed not only to highlight the main information but also to convey additional details, create a visual image of the described phenomena, and provide the author’s commentary. The object of the study is popular science discourse, whose purpose is not only to present the results of current scientific research and technological breakthroughs but also to popularize knowledge among diverse reader groups. The research material comprises six English-language articles published in National Geographic, New Scientist, and All About Space, all devoted to the issues of space exploration. These publications differ in terms of target audience, communicative goals set for journalists, article structure, and visual design. Due to these differences, the texts employ various strategies to influence readers, depending on the author’s intentions. At the same time, it becomes possible to identify key features of the syntactic organization of popular science discourse. Given the common thematic focus, it is feasible to trace the means of influence used by the authors without taking into account the specific features and relevance of the reported information. In the analyzed texts, 36 expressive syntax constructions were identified, including those based on symmetry, segmentation of the utterance, addition of information, redundancy, and rhetorical questions. The primary means of influence proved to be constructions designed to convey additional information, which reflects the characteristics of popular science media discourse. Constructions based on the violation of actual division of the sentence were less frequently represented; they were used by the authors to emphasize the most significant facts and facilitate comprehension of the message. The remaining types of constructions appeared only in isolated examples, indicating that their use is not typical for the discourse under analysis.

The article examines the semantic content of a female leader image as portrayed by contemporary English-language business media. The interest in this topic stems from the social significance of the gender agenda and the changing role of women in the contemporary international business en vironment as well as in the social structure as a whole. The research material comprises 52 interviews with female leaders of various levels, published in Forbes and Fast Company magazines during 2024. The media image of the female leader is considered as an integral concept, actualized through the verbal manifestation of its key components. The research employs a comprehensive methodological framework comprising conceptual, contextual, semantic, and quantitative analysis. Semantic actualizers were selected according to criteria of thematic relevance and recurrence across the interviews and subsequently grouped into 12 sub-concepts, which served as the basis for modeling the concepto sphere of the studied media image. It was found that the core of this conceptosphere is the sub-concept of “Demonstration of Care,” which highlights the paramount importance of a traditionally feminine trait for women in leadership positions. The near-core zone consists of five sub-concepts related to intellectual and volitional qualities (“Overcoming Adversity,” “Innovation,” “Success,” “Intellect,” and “Social Stance”), while the periphery features gender-neutral characteristics of leaders at any level (“Professionalism,” “Passion,” “Originality,” “Pragmatism,” “Assertiveness,” and “Recognition”). Such a configuration of the conceptual sphere of a female leader image in English-language business media suggests the preservation of traditional gender meanings in the media representation of women in management positions. Extrapolating this thesis to a broader context – namely, the perception of the feminine gender in the business environment and society at large – reveals a paradox within the contemporary gender agenda, which declares a commitment to gender equality in professional employ ment while simultaneously maintaining adherence to traditional archetypal notions of women’s social function. The media representation of the female leader, therefore, reflects a compromise between the current social demand for inclusivity and the inertia of the collective unconscious.

The research reveals the axiological components of the linguocultural concepts LIBERTY and FREEDOM in the American culture on the authentic material of the American origin: the USA’s historical documents texts, the American presidents’ inaugural addresses texts, and the data about the USA’s objects of visual art. All the material is intertwined with the intertextual links and presents the homogeneous corpus of the American culture texts. The relevance of this research is explained by the empirical essence of the American values study via the linguocultural concepts as it gives definite knowledge about the country’s culture and its people’s consciousness which is precious to understand the overall process of the country’s development. The research goal is defined as the reveal of the same ness and the difference in the axiological components of the linguocultural concepts of LIBERTY and FREEDOM in the American culture. The novelty is determined by the fact that it is the first time the sameness and the difference in the axiological components of the two distinct concepts – LIBERTY and FREEDOM – have been established on the holistic American material. The research has shown identical and different axiological characteristics of the concepts. Their mutual characteristics demonstrate that both of them are the USA’s symbols and each of them has the tendency to roll across the globe. The differential characteristics of LIBERTY have the names: the endowment of the Creator; the Blessings (ideals, virtues). The differential characteristics of FREEDOM include the names: concrete rights; a free people and free states enjoying rights; freedom of slaves. The research creates comprehensive perception of LIBERTY and FREEDOM in the American culture. The research materials can be used in linguistic area studies, cross-cultural communication, the English language learning, social sciences practice and can be interesting for an audience dealing with the USA culture as a whole.

This study examines contemporary patriotic discourse in Russian poetry through the anthology Call of Victory (2024). The relevance of the study lies in the need to examine patriotic poetry not only as a literary phenomenon but also as a form of discourse, which reflects social values, cultural memory and collective identity. The purpose of the study is to identify the main axiological constants of present–day patriotic poetic discourse and to show that they form an interconnected system of values. The paper draws upon an interdisciplinary methodology to define discourse as both a communicative/cognitive and axiological phenomenon at the text level, as well as to contextualise it against a broader socio–cultural background. Additionally, the study differentiates between the concepts of “text” and “discourse” and emphasises the functional–cognitive dimension of discourse in the analysis of poetic material. Through a cognitive–frame approach, poetic texts are viewed as a medium where culturally relevant frames are verbalised and connected with each other. The material of the study is the anthology Call of Victory, which contains patriotic poems by 36 authors. The analysis has shown that the most important axiological constants of patriotic poetic discourse are MOTHERLAND, DEFEND ER, DUTY, HEROISM, SACRIFICE, MEMORY and FAITH. These constants do not exist in isolation but form an interconnected system. The concept MOTHERLAND is connected with the concepts DEFENDER and DUTY; DUTY is realised through HEROISM and SACRIFICE; MEMORY preserves the connection between the past and the present; FAITH gives moral meaning to struggle, suffering and loss. The paper also examines how value oppositions, such as “ours/theirs”, “loyalty/betrayal” and “memory/oblivion”, build the structure of discourse, develop a sense of collective identity and facilitate the continuation of cultural norms in Russia. The analysis demonstrates that the primary purpose of patriotic poetry is to communicate values and to express their ethical, historical and emotional dimensions. The identified axiological constants organise the main meanings of present–day patriotic poetic discourse and ensure their connection within one system of national and cultural values.

Competitive formats have firmly entered the practice of foreign language teaching at university level, yet linguodidactics still lacks a dedicated category for their theoretical description. Competitiveness is most often treated either as a psychological variable or as a particular methodological technique, which prevents it from being conceptualised as a systemic feature of the educational space. The article aims to introduce into the categorial apparatus of linguodidactics the notion of competitive linguodidactic environment (CLE) and to substantiate its theoretical status as a specific type of the foreign language educational environment. The methodology comprises conceptual analysis, comparative-categorial analysis, and theoretical modelling. Sources were selected according to three criteria: their categorial relevance to linguodidactics and to educational environment theory; their fit with the task of delimiting the construct from adjacent notions; and their direct relation to the motivational and affective dimensions of second language learning. The theoretical foundations include the Russian tradition of educational environment theory, contemporary accounts of the foreign language educa tional environment, self-determination theory, the L2 Motivational Self System, and research on foreign language anxiety. A working definition of CLE is proposed as a specific type of foreign language educational environment in which competitiveness functions as the system-forming principle for selecting goals, content, methods, and assessment. A four-component structural model is developed, comprising the goal, content, socio-communicative, and assessment components. The construct is consistently delimited from competition in second language learning, from the theory of cooperative and cooperative-competitive learning, and from gamification; it is shown to describe a different level of pedagogical reality — the structure of the environment rather than the behaviour of an individual learner, a method, or a tool of engagement. The theoretical contribution lies in the categorial formalisation of an analytical layer that has previously remained outside linguodidactics, and in formulating design principles that take account of the risk of foreign language anxiety. The results provide a basis for empirical validation of the model, for the development of corresponding diagnostic instruments, and for studying the conditions under which a competitive environment remains productive.