Vol. 15 No. 2 (20) (2019)

This article is designed to give a sharper focus on the phonetic properties of advertising in the English speaking world. We come from the premise that globalization processes and the consumer culture of the so-called Net Generation make the marketers change their sales strategies and find new, no less effective promotional tactics, which would be more attractive to the young. To see how this language policy actually works an in-depth processing of the material is required, and cognitive syllabics happens to be a great help in this respect.

Advertising plays a crucial role in our reality. It invades our lives through TV screens, radio frequencies, the pages of newspapers and journals. Being a unique phenomenon in our reality, which is designed for thousands of readers, listeners, viewers, it has given birth to different approaches and opinions. Advertising is a rapidly developing phenomenon, quick in responding to major and minor changes in the social life. Today it has penetrated into sports as well. Sport is a big business and many companies use sport as a means of publicizing their product. Thus, the present paper intends to study sport ads with the aim of presenting them as a register standing out for uniqueness, containing a small scale plot which aims to draw the attention of the reader to the phenomenon. Usually such small texts use the names of world famous sportsmen which immediately attract attention. In sport ads the plot usually includes certain qualities which demonstrate the skills of a given sportsman, and the object is advertised through creating a text which is combined with illustrations of the very object.

The paper highlights the most typical features of the lexico-grammatical category of diminutiveness from the derivational point of view. The correlation between language and culture, language and national linguistic traditions, language and national mentality is revealed through the category under study.

The results of the research prove that applying cognitive approach to the analysis of the category of diminutiveness on the derivational level enables us to reveal: a) the existing asymmetry of linguistic images of the world in different languages, b) graduality of the lexico-grammatical category of diminutiveness in Modern Russian which brings forth peculiar derivational clusters.

Spontaneous spoken language is known to be rich in fragmented and nonintegrated chunks of speech. The latter are the result of syntactic “accidents”, which are indispensible elements of spontaneous talk. Caused by a variety of pragmatic factors, syntactic accidents differ in their formal, lexical, and distributional features. With these features in view, we single out three main varieties of syntactic accidents: 1. maxi-accidents, 2. mini-accidents and 3. micro-accidents, which collectively constitute one whole paradigm.

Within the framework of the present article, the main focus of the analysis is on maxi-accidents in spontaneous talk of middle-class native speakers of English. Based on the empirical data, the analysis outlines the key functional properties of maxi-accidents, such as their frequency of occurrence, positional characteristics and pragmatic reasons that lie behind maxi-accidents.

English is a lingua franca that unites all the nations in the world. It is not only the language of universal communication but also a language to access the scientific world, international business and the world of entertainment as many of the world’s top films, books and songs are published and produced in English. The English that people use for social interaction in India differs considerably from the English spoken in other regions of the world in terms of vocabulary, syntax and other aspects of language. Thus, the aim of the present article is to investigate Indian English as a distinctive variety of English and to show how Indians have customized English in various ways, and willingly or unwillingly, have better suited it to their needs. We also discuss some grammatical peculiarities of Indian English used or experienced in different settings.

One of the challenges of learning English for Iranian learners is “native-like” production of speech rarely achieved by even the most advanced learners. Unfortunately, it is common belief among Iranian English learners that knowledge of individual lexical items is the key to communicative competence. But alas! The outcome has shown this is counterproductive. As an anglicist teaching ESP in general and EAP in particular in my country, I feel responsible for shedding light on this issue inasmuch as I experience the lapse in my everyday professional work. It should be noted that in this Global Village, in which English is considered the Lingua Franca of science and technology, focusing on phraseological units as a sub-branch of lexical proficiency seems to be of paramount importance to avoid misunderstanding and miscommunication. The present article makes an effort to highlight the role of contextual usages of these units in TEFL to help the learners reach the desired native-like production of English speech.

The article addresses the issue of the importance of a full and adequate understanding of a literary ST on the part of the translator. Understanding is crucial on all levels of the text – lexical meanings and connotations, phraseology, idiomaticity, syntax, stylistic devices and overtones, etc. Apart from these, there are various other aspects of the text – its cultural, historical and literary allusions, various culture-specific terms and other, not necessarily, explicit, elements and features that the translator must fully understand so as to produce an adequate and worthwhile rendering of his/her ST in a different language.

Life in the modern age is dominated by social media. What used to be very much a private affair, like birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc., is now celebrated in front of oftentimes the whole world, and not infrequently, through the medium of the language that is not our own.

The object of investigation in the present paper is the speech act of birthday wish sent to someone via Facebook. The analysis demonstrates that although the speech act has a universal aim – to show interest in another person and make them feel good, and although in many cases the language of conveying wishes, beside the native tongues, is the same, this notably being English, the lingua franca of contemporary world, the way the wish is expressed may differ markedly from culture to culture, thereby showing the underlying cultural values and norms of the users and of their native language use. The socio-pragmatic analysis presented here focuses on posts collected from personal profiles of British, Polish, Indian, and Armenian users, and investigates, among others, the choice of language, the formulaic vs. personalised character of the wish, and the character of strategies that make the wishes more personally oriented, with the aim to demonstrate visible differences across cultures regarding the way birthday wishes are phrased.

Nina Gabrielian is a Russian writer of Armenian origin who lives and works in Moscow. She has published collections of poems, stories and critical essays. She is also a fine painter and from the early 2000s she has taken part in several exhibitions collective and personal as well. The imaginative world of her paintings is permeated by the memory of Armenia. In her stories and poems there is particular attention to colour and shape. The lyrical hero is constantly recovering the collective memory of the Armenian Genocide, which can take the deceptively innocent appearance of a children’s game. In this paper I will investigate the way Gabrielian depicts childhood and memory in her literary work.

This article brings epigraphy, history, architecture, archaeology and liturgy together in an investigation of royal political ambitions and identity in tenthand eleventh-century Armenia, offering a new dimension to the usual study of inscriptions. It considers royal Armenian responses to monuments in the landscape, both ancient and recently constructed, and how the kings of two different dynasties proclaimed their greatness and their legitimacy as kings in stone, but in different ways.