Vol. 18 No. 2 (17) (2014)

Vagueness is a widespread phenomenon that sometimes passes unnoticed by the speakers unless there is a deliberate need to be vague. Vague language includes words or phrases that have general meanings and in an imprecise way or deliberately refer to people and things. Vague expressions are discourse markers that add pragmatic tone to an utterance: they are multifunctional in nature and play a vital role in decoding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. The aim of this article is to show the structural and semantic peculiarities of vague expressions and the intention of being vague in interaction. The research is based on corpus findings, namely BYU-BNC (British National Corpus), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), GloWbE (Global Web-Based English) and on TalkBank the role of which is to foster fundamental research of human and animal communication.

Machine Translators are gaining wider usage in the world nowadays. Along with the growth of the use of Machine Translators, the demand to make them more perfect is also increasing, which in its turn implies growth of the problems and difficulties occurring in the process of development. Semantic, syntactic, cultural and social differences of languages highlight these problems more explicitly and make the solutions even more difficult.

The antithesis of the Spanish fairy tales is one of the most usable and most important techniques. Fairy tale is based on the collision of opposites, consequently making opposition as a basis of the artistic scheme of a fairy tale. As a rule, the tale is based on the struggle between good and evil that lies at the heart of antithesis. In fairy tales, the main function of antithesis is to convey certain emotional colouring and create a mysterious magical environment. In many fairy tales antithesis is not only the basis of the individual moments of the narrative, but also the most important text-tool.

In human society, there has always been the division of society into two groups - men and women. Thus, gender roles of men and women have been entrenched for each individual in the society. Based on them later some generalized representations regarding the behaviour of men and women, their expected reactions and actions acceptable only for men or only for women's activities have been formed – in other words, gender stereotypes have been formed in the public consciousness.
The aim of the paper is to show how gender stereotypical ideas about men and women are manifested in English anecdotes.

Traditionally, the word stereotype is defined as a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Various kinds of stereotypes we often encounter in everyday life. Stereotypes involve generalizations about male and female identities and about appropriate roles and aspirations for women and men. Stereotypes may vary depending on the historical, international, as well as the political situation in a given country.

The aim of the present paper is to study the term “hedging”, to find out its role and significance in language use. An attempt is made to introduce different approaches towards hedges brought by various scholars who carried out studies on this linguistic strategy, to reveal the generalizations of the conclusions, at the same time singling out specifities of each to the approach. The study shows that hedges are used for various purposes. Three main functions are differentiated: hedges used to express vagueness, to display politeness, to mitigate speech.

The aim of the present paper is to examine the manifestations of the critical attitude in the process of interpersonal communication. Recently within the frames of pragmatic research the emphasis has been laid on the speaker, on his/her social behavior, psychological disposition. Verbal communication is seen as part of person’s social life, not being detached from the latter. Discourse analysis includes a wide range of contextual cues where such factors as the speakers’ previous communicative experience, the social and psychological prerequisites of communication are of great importance. The investigation of the verbal manifestations of criticizing has become one of the important issues in pragmatics. The analysis of the aforementioned manifestations emphasizes the importance of politeness in speech behaviour. The use of the strategies of linguistic politeness is seen as an effective tool which impedes the impending verbal conflict.

Semantic syntax is based on the notion that any syntactic structure is primarily designed to describe a certain type of relation in reality and each type of relationship in reality finds its preferred expression in a particular syntactic structure. Tautologies are no exception in this respect. The present paper aims at their analysis in line with contemporary linguistic theories, which makes it possible to reveal the peculiarities of their functioning in discourse and to define their role in transferring the speaker’s/writer’s communicative intention in the given speech situation.

The aim of the given paper is to define the status of ellipsis as a means of economy principle realization in the system of constructions with implicit predication. The results of the study enable us to claim that the above-mentioned distinction is based on the criterion of structural and semantic completeness. Namely, elliptical constructions are complete semantically, whereas their structural incompleteness functions as a means of compressing the information within the limits of a given communicative situation for the purpose of achieving certain pragmatic goals.

The paper presents the author's understanding of the concept “phraseological unit”. Accordingly a distinction is made between the terms “a phrase” and a “phraseological unit”. A special attention is paid to the place of the phrase among other phraseological units such as proverbs, sayings, aphorisms, wishes and blessings. This approach relies on the fact that each of these lexical units is characterized by figurativeness, metaphorical-allegorical meaning, emotional-sensory nuances, and expressiveness to some extent.

Präteritum and Past Perfective, Past Imperfective are equivalent tense forms in Armenian as well as in German which denote past action. The main function of these forms in Armenian is to denote completed and non-completed meanings while in German they do not have such function. In the process of grammatical neutralization these forms gain different temporal meanings which alienate the general meaning of the past.

The paper deals with communicative and pragmatic peculiarities of diplomatic discourse as a type of institutional discourse. Diplomatic discourse is viewed as a complex of linguistic, cognitive and communicative aspects. Another significant factor that plays a decisive role in communication, i.e. the linguistic individuality of a diplomat, is underlined. The important elements of diplomatic discourse, manipulation and politeness are also discussed in the paper.

The paper discusses the concept of the origo, i.e. the deictic centre of orientation considering the speaker to be the ground element of the whole deictic system, at the same time focusing on the role and significance of the addressee in the process of deictic nomination and adequate interpretation of the utterance.

The given paper is an attempt to explore the role and importance of audio-visual aids in teaching. The choice of the topic is dictated by the rapid development of new technologies and their interference into educational process. The aim of the paper is to identify the most widespread types of audio-visual aids used in classroom. The practical purpose of the study is to help teachers to integrate efficiently some new classroom technology in teaching.

Listening plays a crucial role both in everyday communication and educational process. A successfully organized listening class which normally involves a wide range of pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening activities results in successful speaking and writing. However, listening activities require not only concentration, vocabulary and background knowledge, but some mental processes such as short-term and long-term memories. Two different kinds of processes are also involved in understanding spoken discourse – bottom-up and top-down processing. When designing tasks we should not demand that our students remember more details than a native speaker would in a real life situation.

The paper deals with the problem of teaching English at the faculty of journalism. Teaching spontaneous speech through recognizing, understanding mass media texts, through acquiring nonverbal components of professional communication can bring about some problems as Armenian speaking journalists living in Armenia, don't have a chance to communicate with native speakers. It is effective to use authentic media texts on journalism. It can increase the efficiency of the educational process, help overcome not only grammatical, lexical, but also socio-cultural, intercultural and pragmatic interference. According to the developed methodical system by carrying out philological, linguistic, literary analysis in English in the process of reading professional texts students develop their communicative competence which can underlie the spontaneous speech.

The paper studies the features of modernist novels by English writer Virgina Woolf. The focus is on the novels “To the lighthouse” and “Jacob՚ s Room”, each of which represents a different stage in the creation of the author. However, conceptually general rules have survived enabling analytically trace the dynamics of the poetics. When analyzing the poetics of Woolf s novels it is inevitable to appeal to the literary movement “stream of consciousness” which occupies a central place in the literature of modernism. Elements of this trend are obvious in the studied novels; the absence of casual relationship, “dissection” of the storyline, “blurring” of boundaries of categories of time and space. The purpose of the writer is to compare the private with the universal, the moment with the eternity, overcome linguistic conventions as just it may bring to the knowledge of basics of entity.

This paper deals with the problem of influence and reception of literary work of American writer Edgar Poe in the French literature before Baudelaire and after him. The name of Edgar Poe was many years almost forgotten in his homeland, and only in virtue of Baudelaire and his contemporaries it found its second birth: at first in France, and later – in Europe and America. In this paper the dynamic of that influence is followed, its peculiarities and conformities to laws in the works of French writers, as well as in their theoretical and critical works – from pre-symbolistic period to the second half of the 20th century.

The paper studies the variety of genres and language peculiarities of the American “underground” writer Ch. Bukowski. He is famous for both his poetic and prosaic works. Absence of rythm and free style of his writings eliminate the boundary between his poetic and prosaic works. Sometimes the distinctive features are the length of the line and the work itself. Being of German descent, Bukowski follows the traditions of German romanticism and expressionism which are characterised by the emotionally unstable state of mind of the author and his determination to reveal the “darkside” of human soul. In terms of language the combination of simplicity and clarity along with spontanity and toughness peculiar to the school of “naturalists” is evident in Bukowski's writings.