Vol. 23 No. 1 (26) (2019)

The paper is devoted to the functional interpretation of special questions in academic discourse, particularly in lectures. To stress the importance of the extralinguistic reality for the interpretation of pragmatic meaning the analysis of the questions is conducted within a wider context. It has been shown that special questions have the function of contributing to the discourse continuity by the elimination of the possible barriers on the way of discourse development.

The readability of a news report greatly depends on the “catchy” nature of the headline. The present paper studies news headlines based on their pragmatic, semantic and syntactic peculiarities, it analyzes how the headlines are linguistically organized and what kind of attention-seeking strategies the language owns that are used in the formation of a headline. Some of the results of a social survey conducted among the non-native speakers of the English language, who follow the English press, are introduced to reveal how ordinary news readers decode the messages conveyed in the headlines.

The paper introduces the structural features of editorials based on the data collected from most popular newspapers. Editorials are newspaper articles that combine fact and opinion to interpret current issues and at the same time shape the readers’ opinion. The main functions of editorials are those of argumentation and persuasion. The paper studies how these functions are expressed by some grammatical means, such as passive voice, modal structures, sentence types.

In the present paper the common semantic fields among the English neologisms are represented with the aim to show the characteristic features of the social life of the English speaking people and the reflection of those features in the language. The neologisms are taken from authentic and naturally occurring language use to show their pragmatic and stylistic values. The new words can express the political, economic, scientific and other aspects of social life and also the change of the society’s way of thinking. We are reassured that neologisms reflect transparently the change in the people’s perception of life in general, they express the problems existent in the society in the given period, the ways people are looking for to solve the problems and the struggle between different parties of people who do not share opinions

The present paper touches upon stylistic peculiarities of “Harry Potter” by J.K. Rowling. In order to provide completeness of the language material observed, an attempt is made to analyze the nuances in the differences between comparisons and similes in daily speech and fairy tales. The paper also analyzes pragmasemantic peculiarities of comparisons and simile used by the author to make the desired impact on the reader.

The paper touches upon the main issues related to the structure and the functions of consciousness. Consciousness is woven out of innumerable threads, which form a complex web of symbols, a complete and specific world. Consciousness reflects the objective reality, but speech symbolizes reality and expresses thought. The impact made by speech is of great interest from the linguistic standpoint as it uncovers the individual characteristics of interlocutors. 

The paper defines the correlation of denotative and the connotative components of the text during the process of analytical reading of fictional texts. It reveals the substantive and functional characteristics of the text, which may contribute to the development of semantic competence of students. It emphasizes the role of the analytical reading of a fictional text in forming and developing students' critical thinking, as well as their socio-cultural, pragmatic, communicative competence.

The conceptual analysis of paremiological units, having home/hame, man, success, woman/mother, friend, children/bairns, wit, devil, peace, bread, God, bird as their basic conceptual component, on a firm linguocultural and linguocognitive bases, shows that Scottish paremiological units were formed on the basis of national values and wisdom. The true method of such analysis is the conceptual one whose task is to present national values and mentality in the completeness of thought. Thus, Scottish national mentality, values and wisdom become highlighed on general human values as a result of the knowledge obtained by this ethnic group’s positive experience. This knowledge is memorised in the form of patterns.

The present paper seeks to analyze the correlation between the concepts “event” and “fact” within the framework of linguistic and philosophical studies. As an overview of the theoretical literature has shown, in both linguistic and philosophical works the concept “event” is correlated with a number of notions, such as changes, actions, processes and facts. If an event exists in time and space, a fact can not be correlated with the real objective world. An event has got an ontological status, whereas a fact belongs to the logical domain. An event is a result of processes and purposeful actions that lead to the changes in situations. It is worth mentioning that these changes are considered to be unusual, extraordinary and are evaluated by society as vital and significant ones. An event also differs from a situation. The dynamic nature of the event is directly opposed to a static essence of a situation which is defined as constant state of affairs. 

The present paper deals with one of the types of implicit meaning, the presupposition, one of the peculiarities of which is the property of implicating out of dialogue. It’s general and background knowledge which the speakers have or can imply about each other, other people and the environment. As an unintentional implicit meaning, presupposition helps us to avoid voicing unnecessary details. In case of intentional implicit meaning, presupposition is a means of emphasizing not explicit but important information. It depends on verbal intentions of a speaker to qualify presupposition as intentionally or unintentionally expressed implicitness. The paper also touches upon the types of presupposition.

The paper examines the key concepts of Highlandism, Keilyard, Clydesidsism and their meaning, as well as the role of these concepts in the historical stages of the formation and development of Scottish national identity. The aim of the research is to show how these concepts have influenced the formation of a national discourse and popularization of the image of Scotland.

The paper discusses the image of “New Armenia” in international press releases. It considers information and analytical publications by authoritative media, studies the linguistic units used in them on two levels: lexical and syntactical. On lexical level, the research has been conducted on the basis of the classification of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs expressing social and political content. On syntactical level, widely used collocations are classified as syntagmаs implementing functions of transmission and impact.

Cinema is one of the crucial constituents of present-day media and informational order in general. However, the documentaries have not been paid sufficient attention to. The categorization of the documentaries, their specific nature and basic characteristics, their prosody and pragmatics remain a debatable problem. The paper is an attempt to cover the gap in the study of one of the most popular subgenres of documentaries – the popular science films in regard to their prosody and pragmatics. The prosodic arrangement plays a crucial role in expressing the communicative and aesthetic functions in documentaries, in externalizing the implicit information.

The paper addresses the phonopragmatic functions of inversion. As a compositional device inversion has been studied from different points of view – stylistic, grammatical, and prosodic. In spite of copious studies of inversion in linguistic literature it has not been analysed from the point of view of its pragmatic characteristics, though it is widely used to realize the emotional-expressive component of communication. The paper focuses on the pragmatics of syntax, the influence of inversion on the pragmatic realization of context with the help of prosodic features. 

Dialogue as the basic unit of communication is still in the draw of attention of analysts, though many of its aspects have been thoroughly investigated. Yet, in communicative linguistics the pragmatic aspect of dialogues has not received the due attention. The paper addresses the problem of pragmatics of expressives as constituents of superphrasal interrogative units with a special accent on consequents in dialogic speech in Modern English.

Thе paper introduces the current status of theories of politeness and compares them to the classical politeness models. Considering the publications of the last decade an attempt is made to carry out the analysis of recent papers in the field of politeness with special reference to the achievements in impoliteness research.

Learning a foreign language should not be viewed separately from learning culture(s) behind it. The ability to speak another language fluently does not guarantee an effective communication with the native speakers of the language. Therefore, culture studies should be made an inseparable part of foreign language courses. The paper calls attention to the need to encompass more cultural components into the EFL curricula. It examines some of the communication problems arising from intercultural ignorance and considers the cultural aspects to be covered and the ways of building cultural knowledge.

The paper is an attempt to describe the important role of phraseological units, proverbs and sayings in a language and to reveal their linguocultural peculiarities. The language material under study often causes difficulties for translators which may result in semantic inadequacy in a target language. A number of exercises, used in the learning process, are aimed at improving interpreting skills, enriching the learner's vocabulary and developing linguocultural knowledge.

The present paper touches upon the ways, principles and other nuances of teaching foreign language vocabulary and grammar through the modern methods. It also refers to teaching styles on which the selection of a method, time management, the role of an instructor and a learner, their rights and responsibilities in the process of teaching and learning are based. Some of these methods are to develop all learning skills – listening, speaking, writing, reading, while others improve some of them. The selection of a method also depends on the abilities and knowledge of a learner, private or group lesson type, etc.

The paper introduces Chinese hieroglyphs as one of ancient writing in the world. It is given a detail describing of teaching hieroglyphs. According to these compound hieroglyphs teaching will be more simple, available and thorough. It is represented both theoretical and practical methods of teaching. It is spoken about word and morpheme. In China both words and morphemes are represented as hieroglyphs. It is given an explanation by what methods to distinguish the word from morpheme.

The present article is an attempt to present the analytical approaches to C.Odets’s and L.Hellman’s plays who were the 20th century sociopolitical drama representatives. Particularly, here the themes of playwright and society as well as man and woman and class belonging are revealed. Moreover, we pay a special attention to the influence of American society of the crisis era on the above mentioned authors.

The purpose of this paper is to present the formation of characteristic features and traits of Spanish writer, Nobel Prize winner, founder of tremendism, member of Royal Spanish Academy Camilo Jose Cela’s aesthetic thinking. In general terms the paper also examines the major aesthetic-ideological changes in Spanish literature after the Spanish Civil War. An attempt is made to study and demonstrate Cela’s creative principles and characteristic features through his works “The Family of Pascual Duarte”, “The Hive” and “Journey to the Alcarria”.

The purpose of the paper is to reveal modern novelist Khaled Hosseini’s main hero Amir in the novel “The Kite Runner”. Hosseini's delicate, ironic and sentimental novel helps to perceive the main hero Amir's inward emotions and guilt. The perceptions of sin, betrayal, love and the hero’s attitude toward his best friend Hassan help us to understand the novel and the Afghan author better.

The paper attempts to indentify and analyze from the viewpoint of the mythological tradition the main mythological characters of the novel by the 20th century Russian writer Anatoly Kim. The paper features the key characteristics of the main legendary “hero” of the novel. Using the myth the writer embodies the idea of a cosmic, harmonious world.