The article focuses on the concept of personification metaphor in the economic media discourse, which is clarified and supplemented. A brief overview is given of the linguistic works devoted to the issue. The significance of the research of this type of metaphor in economic mass media discourse lies in the increasing interest of the target audience caused by the increased level of education worldwide and the increased number of economic actors, as well as the rapid development of the media space. The article considers the trends in the dynamics of a personification metaphor use on the material of the German-language mass media articles. The article aims to single out the main features of the personification metaphor and the ways in which it is actualized in the media discourse during the crisis and the economic growth. In addition, the task was also to analyse the variants of its actualization in a diachronic perspective. The illustrative material was selected by continuous sampling of analytical and informational articles from such big media portals in Germany as Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Fokus, Handelsblatt, Manager Magazin, Ökonomenstimme, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Welt. Methods of quantitative and contextual analysis were applied to explain the illustrative material. The total number of contexts analysed in the process of work is 225. A high frequency of the personification metaphor allows us to see the quantitative difference in the metaphorical saturation of media materials within the specified periods of the crisis and the economic growth. The pragmatic attitudes of the authors of the media texts are determined by their comments and the methods they use to express value judgments. It is also pointed out that the subjects of metaphorical mapping of that type can form the opposition ‘stable economy − economic crisis’. The article addresses the linguists speaking German and other professionals interested in the stylistic features of economic texts.

This article analyzes the speech behavior of participants in business communication in German business correspondence, determines the linguistic component of interaction in the mode of polite business communication, considers communicative tactics for implementing the addressee’s intentions, establishes extralinguistic factors that influence the choice of certain communication tactics. Taking into account the specifics of business communication, the customer and the contractor are considered as participants in business communication, who, depending on the situation, can change their roles. As a result of the study of documentary materials on the basis of two types of business communication texts − commercial proposals and reclamations − specific markers of the influence of communicants for the implementation of their communicative intentions were identified. The conducted linguopragmatic analysis made it possible to identify the conditions for maintaining the mode of politeness in the process of communication between the parties to ensure successful communication, as well as to establish potential transformations of the mode of politeness into a mode of conflicting speech behavior, leading to a violation of the positive image of the interlocutor. As a result of the study, it was found that the contractor bears more communication expenditures than the customer, in accordance with the specifics of the relationship, due to the different social roles of the participants in business communication.

The article considers the issue of linguistic modeling of the image of the police in the newspa[1]per discourse, in newspaper headlines in particular. This article is relevant and determined by the need to study the representation of reality in the media discourse and its linguistic manifestation. In addition, the media have recently paid close attention to the coverage of the activities of social institutions, especially with regard to law enforcement agencies. The authors describe the characteristics of the mass media discourse as one of the tools for implementing public power, organizing the activities of political and social institutions, and forming an image. The paper considers the specific features and functions of the newspaper discourse, and also considers the newspaper headline, which acts as a pragmatic component of a newspaper article contributing to the creation of information and social mediation between addressees and addressers in order to exert a regulatory influence on public opinion. The article focuses on the structural, semantic and stylistic analysis of the newspaper headlines that represent information about law enforcement agencies’ activities in Russia and the United States. The authors divide the publications into neutral (“Arguments and Facts”, “USA Today”, “Wall Street Journal”), pro-government (“Newspaper. Ru”, “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” and “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, “Associated Press”) and opposition newspapers (“Novaya Gazeta”, “Kommersant”, “The New York Times”, “Washington Post”). In total, 60 newspaper headlines were analyzed for the period from September to December 2020. The results show that the texts of newspaper reports perform informative and pragmatic functions, and the newspaper headline is the key to understanding the author’s position and intentions. Lexical, grammatical, and stylistic differences in the headlines of Russian and American newspapers devoted to the activities of law enforcement agencies were identified, as well as language techniques for exerting speech influence on the reader and linguistic modeling of the police image.

Verbs denoting change of state are a semantic-syntactic universal as they share common patterns in languages of different types. One of such patterns is their ability to take part in causative-inchoative alternation when one and the same situation codified by certain language units can be seen both from the viewpoint of the actor vs recipient (transitive model) and from the viewpoint of the recipient only, provided that the recipient is the only agent in the verb’s structure (inchoative model), unlike in passive constructions. In causative-inchoative alternation situations these verbs choose one of the three alternation types: a) suppletive (matar – morrer), b) anticausative, when the inchoative meaning is codified morphologically with the help of the pronominal particle se (espantar – espantar-se) and c) labile, when the inchoative meaning is optionally marked by se without any change in grammaticality or semantics. The present paper argues that the choice of pronominal or non-pronominal form of the verb in the inchoative meaning with an inanimate subject (A janela (se) quebrou) depends on the parameter of animate / inanimate subject in the corresponding transitive construction and, to a certain extent, on the graduality inherent to the verb’s semantics (the acceptability of quantification). It is also shown that Brasilian Portuguese reveals the tendency to realize the labile type of alternation when the subject of the inchoative verb is inanimate; in Old Portuguese, on the contrary, the anticausative type (marked by se) was more frequent.

The paper considers linguistic and discursive features of anthropocentric myth creation in the social and political media. Myth creation in the social and political context is viewed as creation of social and political myths correlating with real and fictional events, public persons or social and political phenomena. The author brings into light the role of the media audience as one of the leading factors ensuring successful creation of the media mythological image appealing predominantly to the emotional sphere in the mass recipient’s consciousness. Strange as it might seem, the anthropocentric mythological discourse demonstrates the minimal amount of explicit emotiveness, which creates conditions for independent evaluation of the information by the audience itself. Narrative is considered to be the basic myth creation format. It is represented as a series of stories about the myth creation object. Given the diachronic aspect of myth creation and its chronotope which can span quite a long period of time, it is suggested to speak of the narrative continuum focused on a media person who is in the centre of public attention. It is pointed out that media myth creation takes place on the basis of implications which appear in the process of reception of factual information by the media audience. The interaction of verbal and non-verbal means typical of the media fosters creation of a full-bodied anthroponymic mythological image, which calls for a special study.

The article deals with the variations of predicative pragmatic marker I pray yow / thee. The linguistic material is taken from the texts that were written in XIV-XV centuries by English authors and created in different genres (plays, ballades, visions, confessions, etc.) containing elements of dialogic speech. It has been found that the marker was not a stiff structure during the period under consideration. The variations of the expression were formed as the result of miscellaneous processes that can be seen in its following features: non-fixed composition of the marker, that can be enlarged (by an adverb here I the pray, a modal verb I wold the pray) and can be reduced (by elision of a object pronoun I preye), non-permanent word order depending on the requirement of a rhyme and preferences of the writer (I þe praye, y pray Þe, preye I thee), the representation of the expression in the sentence as both parenthetical clause and main one (followed by a that-subordinate clause). The peculiarities of the location of the marker in the sentence are discussed. If I pray yow/thee is the only one pragmatic marker in the sentence, it is placed at the beginning or at the end of it. The placement of the parenthetical expression inside the receiving sentence is characteristic of the individual style of the author and is not common. If the expression is combined with other markers, predicative and non predicative, there are two variants of their localization in the sentence: «pointwise», when several markers are concentrated at the beginning or at the end of the construction, and «framework», when phatic parts are located in ante- and postposition of the markers receiving sentence.

The article considers the traits of digital academic discourse and the discursive features of MOOC lectures, i.e. video lectures from massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are described as a subgenre of distance lectures. The research bears considerable relevance given the need for the analysis of transformation processes in academic discourse amid the widespread use of information and communication technologies in the higher education system and the advance of online learning. The article describes the evolution of lectures from classroom (analogue) to digital ones, with the latter defined as a genre of academic discourse. The research studies video lectures presented by major British and American universities on the Coursera and EdХ websites. It presents some distinguishing characteristics of a MOOC-lecture, specifying, among others, its extralinguistic traits which impact on its linguistic features, particularly the addressee factor. The theoretical perspective on the matter can be applied in linguistic disciplines, which aim at undergraduate and postgraduate students opting for the scientific path in the international context.

The article is aimed at identifying onomastic rhymes as part of rhyming slang and analyzing them from a socio-cultural perspective. They are built on the names of American celebrities from the world of politics and social activities and believed to be fixers of cultural and historical items that are of certain value from the point of view of culture-oriented linguistics, cross-cultural communication and the general study of culture. TThe research methods applied are determined by the purpose and objectives of the research and include a descriptive and a linguistic ones, the latter comprising context and definitional analysis, and also semantic interpretation. The rhymes are based on the names that have been widely represented in the media from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, thus forming part of the modern cultural collective memory of the carriers of the English-speaking culture. The noted tendency of preferential creation of new rhymes, exploiting precedent onyms, became dominant in the development of rhyming slang at the turn of the century. The authors come to the conclusion that the rhymes illustrating the world of high politics have been added to the well-mastered and familiar onomastic rhymes, built on the names of celebrities from the world of cinema, pop music, popular culture and sports. The article brings to light the rhymes that have not yet been recorded in authoritative slang dictionaries. The research results can be of interest to the specialists working on the topics of intercultural communication, linguistic and cultural studies, cultural linguistics, political linguistics, euphemization, contrastive linguistics of the English and Russian languages.

The authors of the article introduced the term ‘a professional essay’ by which is meant a genre of scientific academic discourse. A professional essay in law is a variant, which is characterized by its specific argumentation based on formal and dialectical logic. The formal logic is based on the principles of syllogism. At the same time, one should not equate the logic of discourse with its linguistic structure. For example, the functioning of discursive connectors in the process of argumentation occurs according to the laws of language and is described on the basis of its linguistic specifics (breadth and contextual conditionality of meaning, contextual synonymy, etc.

The article is devoted to dynamic transformational processes within contemporary English minitexts (small-format texts). The paper reflects the findings of a research that encompasses 500 advertising abstracts to works of fiction. Transformational dynamics is disclosed in terms of linguosynergetics based on a dynamic-and-systemic representation of evolutionary developments in book abstract discourse. Particularly, the conventional invariant discourse features are considered; non-systemic stochastic elements are revealed in such texts; abstract discourse ability of generating senses which exceed mechanic addition of text units meanings, i.e. functional synergism, is under analysis. The authors argue that fluctuations are observed on the lexical, structural and contextual levels of text organisation. The analysis of the data obtained leads to the conclusion that the system features of book abstracts are currently undergoing transformation of their pragmasemantic parameters, which are moving towards those of purely advertising discourse. Today’s trend to the reduction of the verbal communication volume shows that the prospect for further investigation of minitexts (including book abstract discourse) lies in the elaboration of the pragmasemantic synergism concept, with the said discourse feature being of special significance to the texts aimed at compact incorporation of considerable contents.

 The work deals with the groups in which the first noun eine Gruppe has a quantitative meaning (eine Gruppe + Subst.Plural), and the second is a countable noun. The analysis of word combinations consisting of two nouns makes it possible to pose and clarify many questions regarding the interaction of syntax and semantics. The corpus of journalistic texts allowed us to see the quantitative distribution of the models on the basis of which the combinations with the noun Gruppe are organized. The combinations without a definition before the second component were organized according to the following models: eine Gruppe + Subst.Plural (eine Gruppe Menschen); eine Gruppe + von + Subst.Plural (eine Gruppe von Menschen); eine Gruppe + Subst.Adj.Plural / Subst.Part.Plural (eine Gruppe Freiwilliger); eine Gruppe + von + Subst.Adj.Plural / Subst.Part.Plural (eine Gruppe von Freiwilligen); The combinations that have a definition before the second component were organized according to the models: eine Gruppe + Adj. / Part. + Subst.Plural (eine Gruppe fleißiger / fleißige Studenten); eine Gruppe + von + Adj. / Part. + Subst.Plural (eine Gruppe von fleißigen Studenten). In our work, the principles of construction and lexical filling of the quantitative group with the noun Gruppe were shown, the mechanism of their use by native speakers was demonstrated. During the research, the noun was tested for compatibility with the names of different semantic groups. We have identified permanent semantic relationships with other names that enter into characteristic syntactic relationships with it.

 The article examines linguopragmatic and linguoculturological aspects of the precedent phenomena usage in the Spanish media discourse aiming to define the pragmatic potential of the precedent in it and to partially reconstruct the Spanish picture of the world and linguistic identity by defining the linguoculturological importance of the precedent phenomena. The language is seen as an instrument for coding and translating cultural-semantic information. The definition of the notion ‘precedent’ is given and the basic theories on contemporary precedent studies are analyzed, the intertextuality theory in particular. A precedent phenomenon in the text is seen as a manifestation of a linguistic world-image, world knowledge objectification as well as a powerful tool of peoples’ minds manipulation by its implicit verbal influence on the audience. According to D. Gudkov’s classification, there are the following universal and national precedent phenomena: precedent situations, precedent names and precedent expressions. In the media text a precedent phenomenon is seen as one of the means of the implementation of the following strategies: semantic, pragmatic, conversational and rhetorical. Intertextuality is predominantly manifested in neologisms, allusions and quotations, which refer to the world and Spanish literature, the Bible, mythological sources and historical realia and Spanish internal events. The obtained results have proved the original hypothesis, according to which precedent phenomena in the media discourse reflect the cultural fund and the historical memory of the Spanish linguocultural community thus serving as a culture and language conductor. They also provide an indirect communication between the representatives of different cultures, epochs and generations.

 The article discusses the semantics of the phraseological units of the Portuguese language, which have a component from the thematic group “food”. The relevance of studying this group of phraseological units, which until now has not been the subject of a separate research in Russian Portuguese studies, is due to the fact that food, for natural reasons, is an important part of the cultural code of the people, the clue of which, in turn, is hidden in the national language. The research methodology meets the goal of conducting a comprehensive analysis of the semantics of phraseological units; in this regard the work uses the methods of lexical-semantic, component, quantitative and comparative analysis, the method of linguistic description in combination with cultural commentaries. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that for the Portuguese-speaking peoples, the culinary sphere has become a source of a large number of phraseological units, the semantic features of which reveal the specifics of the linguistic picture of the world of the native speakers. The division of the studied phraseological units into phraseosemantic groups showed that the largest number of phraseological units is associated with a description of a person (his appearance, character) and his behavior and actions. The study of the ways of the formation of phraseological units with the component “food” gave rise to the selection of eight groups. Among the phraseological units studied in the work, three different types of phraseological variance were identified and described, as well as features of phraseological synonymy, antonymy, and homonymy. In addition, examples of phraseological derivation and polysemy were identified and described.

In the focus of the article is a comparative sociolinguistic analysis of the speech and manners of the British and American gentlemen as portrayed in the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The study enables us to look into the deep-rooted English traditions and values against which the American cultural distinctness is brought to light. The underlying British culture ‘the master – butler dyad’ is a marker of the aristocratic culture and us-them divide. The analysis is based on the selection of culturally marked elements of speech and manners of the English lord and the American gentleman (linguistic and extralinguistic) approached from sociolinguistic, semantic, interpretative and comparative perspectives and aimed at revealing common and culturally specific characteristics. The study has demonstrated that the English lord confides in his butler, his manner of interaction is based on the principle of mutual respect and manifested by his voice, always calm and gentle; he actively participates in making pivotal political decisions; his speech is marked by U-words (‘a chap’, adjectives ‘awfully’, ‘terribly’, ‘jolly’, ‘quite’), borrowings and the phenomena of understatement and overstatement. The American gentleman is portrayed as a businesslike and easy going master with a trusting manner of behavior, at the same time always bantering and humiliating a butler, thus putting him in an awkward situation. He is more generous in money spending; his speech is marked by ‘technical language’. Bantering is seen as a symbol of American culture and a new style of life.

 The article deals with certain aspects of conceptualization of time, predetermined by the national specificity of the world perception. The topicality of the given study is accounted for by the extremely differentiated verbalization of space and time peculiar to the Dagestanian languages. The aim of the article is to identify the common origin of temporal and spatial vocabulary in the Dagestanian languages. To achieve the goal, the authors used a comparative-typological method, as well as a cognitive approach to reveal the role of national consciousness in conceptualization of time. The article also examines some aspects of national peculiarities of time conceptualization aimed at finding out the genetic connection between temporal and space vocabulary. The data under study allows claiming that in the basis of most lexemes with temporal meaning lies a semantic component denoting “space”. Temporal lexemes representing cycling time were developed by means of objectivation of the heavenly bodies’ movement. Meanwhile temporal vocabulary representing line time was formed by means of semantic conversion which allowed transforming local adverbs onto temporal. The most important results obtained by the authors are as follows: (a) the conceptualization of time in the Dagestanian languages is realized on the basis of spacial parameters, so the vocabulary of temporal semantics are formed on the basis of spatial vocabulary; b) the temporal vocabulary of the Dagestanian languages has evolved along the lines of spatial representations > space-time representations> time representations. The results achieved are important for the cognitive studies of the Dagestanian languages, as well as for the further description of the space and time conceptualization in the world language pictures. 

 The paper deals with the semantic category of temporal irreality, based on the phraseological units (PUs) of the Modern Greek language. The phraseology as an anthropocentric linguistics sphere uses the phenomena of the surrounding world, including temporality, which are perceived through the prism of the national linguistic picture of the world. The linguistic model of perception and reproduction of unreality is expressed in grammatical and semantic categories. Structural PUs’ components form specific images of the linguistic picture of the world of the native speaker of the Modern Greek language, associated with extra-linguistic and linguistic factors. The author uses the continuous sampling method and analyzes various components related to different cultural codes. As a result the systematic nature of syntactic models of PUs reveals a certain typology of the methods of their formation. The article is intended for specialists in the field of studying and teaching the Greek language and can be used in comparative and typological studies of the Balkan studies.

 This article discusses the problem of modeling cultural and language environment in the preparation of specialists for intercultural communication. Intercultural communication presupposes that the interlocutors have the necessary amount of information about the specifics of the culture in contact, mentality, value system, traditions, peculiarities of the interlocutor’s speech and non-speech behavior. The simulated environment contains the necessary amount of information, the assimilation of which contributes to the success of international specialists in intercultural communication. The purpose of the article was to develop criteria for the selection of media materials, to determine the functions of a multimedia environment, as well as to identify the advantages and controversial aspects of its creation. In the course of the research, methods of analysis of scientific and theoretical sources, analysis and systematization of empirical experience were used. The article presents the concept of multimedia cultural and language environment, understood as a cultural and linguistic communicative space created for educational purposes with the help of multimedia, in which the perception of a foreign language speech and the culture it broadcasts is realized. Based on the goals of training international specialists, the following criteria for the selection of authentic media materials are being developed: compliance with the value attitudes of modern Russian society, compliance with the topic of educational programs, novelty of information, availability of language design of texts. The functions of the multimedia cultural and linguistic environment are educational, informational, diagnostic, motivational.