Vol 29, No 2 (2023)

The article explores women’s political activity in Europe of the XVI century. The vivid example of that were Renée of France’s actions during her staying in Ferrara (1528–1559). After her parent’s death, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, the princess was an important element of the Valois dynastic policy for a long time. She was a potential bride in the rapidly changing combinations of the period of the Italian Wars. Being married to the Duke of Ferrara, Renée was the daughter of France, first of all, and became a guide of the French kings’ political aspirations in Italy. The Duchess also assumed the patroness role for French emigrants-supporters of Protestantism, which created a unique precedent in the dispute over jurisdiction in matters of faith between her husband Ercole d`Este and Pope of Rome. The example of Renée of France contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between diplomacy and marriage in the royal houses of Europe. The role of a high-ranking lady in conducting diplomatic practices is revealed as a mediator in the politics of France and Ferrara. Thus, the analysis of local religious and political activity of Renée of France allows correlating the realities of princess’s «political body» with her actions as a direct actor of European politics.

The article is an attempt to consider the analogues of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730–1740) among the higher bodies of state administration in the XVI–XVIII centuries. The relevance of this issue is due to the fact that historians, when searching for analogues of the Cabinet, rarely go beyond the limits of the Russian state. On the basis of the analysis of higher state institutions of some European countries in XVI–XVIII centuries the author determined that such institutions – secret councils – had characteristic features. It is revealed that such state institutions were characterized by a narrow composition, uncertainty of competence, beginnings of specialization in the sphere of management. The article suggests that the emergence of secret councils reflected the growth of absolute power of the monarch. It is analyzed that the origins of such institutions are in the early Middle Ages, when the monarch had deliberative councils, the high role in which was played by the aristocracy. In the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, these institutions were transformed – the aristocracy was gradually replaced by specially trained officials under the control of the monarch. On the basis of the involved materials it is investigated that in different states the situation developed in a heterogeneous way. The author suggests that, unlike the Supreme Privy Council, usually referred to by historians as the prototype of the Cabinet, the supreme body of power under Anna Ioannovna did not seek to fully replace the monarch, but was a convenient tool in his hands. The author concludes that on a number of features the Cabinet of Anna Ioannovna can be defined as a typical institution within the classical absolutist model of the state.

The article examines the demographic aspect of the formation and development of the same faith in the Samara province of the second half of the XIX – early XX century. The main attention is paid to the analysis of changes in the number of the co-religionist population. Demographic data combined with information about the geographical localization of parishes make it possible to determine the extent of the spread of the same faith in the region. The dynamics of the numerical and share ratio of co-religionists in relation to the total number of Old Believers of the Samara province is presented in the study as one of the key criteria for the effectiveness of the Orthodox mission in countering local schism. Statistical data on the number of co-religionists are given in the article both separately by parishes and by the province as a whole. Counting the parishioners of the co-religionist communities allowed us to establish that the co-religionists, being in the middle of the XIX century an insignificant religious group within the Russian Orthodox Church, by 1917 in terms of the number of its adherents, it became one of the largest Old Believer «concordances» of the province. In the preparation the method of analysis of historical documents, historical-system, historical-comparative and statistical methods were used. The source base of the study was based on data from the clerical lists of co-religionist parishes stored in the funds of the Central State Archive of the Samara region, as well as materials from reports of diocesan missionaries and official church publications.

The article deals with the problem of studying the Soviet-Japanese War in the system of basic general education, through a comprehensive analysis of information material in school textbooks from 1952 to the present. The relevance of this topic is explained by certain specifics of Russian-Japanese relations, which can be described as restrained, due to a number of territorial, economic and political contradictions. Almost every year, Japan raises the issue of the territorial affiliation of some islands of the Kuril ridge, putting forward claims and calls for a revision of decisions taken following the Second World War. But Japanese diplomacy faces a firm position of the Russian Federation on this issue. Such diplomatic battles have been going on since the middle of the last century to this day and are the reason that a peace treaty between the countries has not been concluded yet. In modern conditions of aggravation of international relations, the topic of the Soviet-Japanese war of 1945 and the results of the Second World War in the education system are becoming one of the key topics. In the study of educational materials of textbooks on the topic of the Soviet-Japanese war, the main attention was paid to the volume of historical material presented to students for study, illustrative material, the content part, that is, how much the topic is disclosed as fully and in detail as possible, as well as schematic maps. Thus, the analysis of the content of the text material in textbooks revealed the wave-like dynamics of the information volume, from the quantitative and qualitative growth of historical information, especially in the early 1980s, to its sharp reduction in the materials of modern textbooks.

This article is meant to highlight the latest changes in the phonostylistic format of the genre of university lecturing. The focus is on the rhetorically diverse nature of intellective communication in the present-day multicultural English-speaking community. Our material shows that the manifestations of the innovative tendencies in American public speaking (and scientific discourse at large) are not numerous in British academic English. Not infrequently they are ousted by the linguocultural stereotypes, as well as aesthetic and ethical principles of scientific communication established in their own linguistic community. It is only in the opening and the closing part of the lecture, as well as in all kind of illustrative or explanatory digressions in its Main Body, that the American influence can be more or less clearly observed. More often than not, typically British English manner of exposition, such as understatement or hedging, comes to the fore and plays the major part in the transfer to the new, friendly and unbuttoned mode of the genre of lecturing. There are all kind of prosodic transformations in the main part of the lecture, which enable the speaker to accommodate and satisfy the tastes and demands of the new generation of university audience. This, however, is by no means to the detriment of the scientific message or information, which any lecture by definition, as it were, is designed to impart. It transpires that the well-established requirements of the prosodic and rhetorical minimums, which Russian anglicists have so far adhered to, should also be replenished, reorganized and renovated with respect to the new requisites for scientific communication in the English-speaking world. The methodology of the learner-oriented English language acquisition, however, should remain undisturbed, and the traditional stereotypes of the genre of lecturing should be reckoned with to fit the ethics of academic discourse in this country.

The article deals with the problem of widening the scope and nomenclature, as well as methods of investigation, as connected with the phenomenon of the language metaphor. It is pointed out that the theory of conceptual metaphor which was postulated within the cognitive linguistics surely creates a general framework for the description of the metaphorical process as a whole. But if one takes some special aspects of the metaphor as a hybrid of cognitive and linguistic processes it seems insufficient to point out only the models based on substantivized notions, as ARGUMENT IS WAR. We suppose that the metaphorical architectonics is based not only on the mentioned substantive-like models, but on the predicative knots, such as formed by such parts of speech as adjectives or verbs, as well. Within this paper, in particular, the complex linguistic activity analysis of the paradigm of metaphorical models with the kernel English verb bring and its equivalents using the joined methods of grammar-morphological, syntactical, semantico-syntactical, stylistical, linguo-pragmatical and other projections of the language and speech investigations, necessarily preserving the cognitive semantic basis of the research. The possibility of simultaneous appearance of metaphor and metonymy finds its reflection in the paper, this fact giving possibility to view them not only as independent but the intercrossing one another phenomena. The necessity of similar studies of the metaphorization process according to the vector of searching for their universal properties is marked in the paper.

This research project considers a specific way of studying English vocabulary. The authors believe that the use of a specialized dictionary developed by them will help to quickly and efficiently master foreign language material, which, in turn, will provide more effective training in professional English for future specialists in the technical industry.

The article deals the typological tools used by the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek to describe the mythologized reality. The research material is the novel «Children of the Dead» (1997), marked by the most daring language experiments. The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of the language practice of Jelinek for deconstructing modern myths of public consciousness. Its destructive method is based on the theoretical constructions of R. Barth and J. Baudrillard. Jelinek translates the procedure of demystification of consumer consciousness undertaken by French philosophers into the linguistic plane of the postmodern deconstruction method. The language in the novel appears as a carrier of the traumatic memory of the Nazi past, which continues to exist in the hyperreality of the present. The deconstruction of mythological structures in the novel is carried out in bold language experiments, in the element of language games, in new unexpected contexts. The most frequent stylistic means of Jelinek are metabola, conceptual metaphors, grotesque, oxymoron, occasionalisms, realized metaphors, metalanguage play with text and other types of tropes. All this is aimed in the text of the novel at the super-task of demythologization. Jelinek replaces «emotional catharsis», as in the perception of high culture, with a more effective «critical catharsis», which allows the reader to take a sobering position in relation to demystified reality.

The article is devoted to the research of verbal markers of evaluation in the statements of foreigners studying German at the elementary level (A1) about the content of the German language textbooks in the German educational discourse. The problems of the research are connected with the low level of knowledge of the dynamic phenomenon of feedback and its verbalization in the form of evaluative statements of foreigners about the content of the German language textbooks offered to them in Germany in the field of learning German as a foreign language. The linguistic methods of the research were the discursive and lexical analysis of verbal markers of evaluation found in the evaluation statements of the foreign learners. The language material was collected at the Language Centre of the Würzburg University (Germany) during a targeted survey of foreigners studying German at the elementary level (A1). The topicality of the research is due to the prospects of studying the axiological phenomenon of feedback in the German educational discourse, the diversity of the potential for cognitive variation of the thematic content and lexical content of the German language textbooks. The results obtained with the help of discursive and lexical analysis of verbal markers of evaluation demonstrate the diversity and reactions of foreigners to the content of the German language textbooks Netzwerk A1.1 – A1.2 and certain accents in the assessments of the content, process and learning outcomes based on them. The obtained results and conclusions are debatable, since with a general positive assessment of authentic German language textbooks, verbal markers of evaluation with a negative connotation are presented in the statements of foreigners, indicating aspects, attitudes, dominant content (primarily thematic relevance) that require correction and optimization in the modern global German educational discourse. According to the model of this research, another research can be carried out from the standpoint of discursive linguistics to verify aspects of evaluating educational strategies and coding key concepts, also a comparative one.

The subject of the study is occasional words formed at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI centuries. The purpose of the article is a various characteristics of occasional words in the Russian language of the turn of the centuries. Methods of continuous sampling, observation, description, word-formation, classification and functional-semantic analysis were used in the course of the study; quantitative methodology was applied to determine the ratio of grammatical categories of occasional words and the spheres of their functioning. Excerpts from subcorpuses of the National Corpus of the Russian Language provided the main language material. The analysis allowed to define styles where occasional words are most commonly encountered and to distinguish between fiction and journalistic occasional words. The result of the study identified the main problematic issues related to occasional words (their features, reasons of occurrence, a variety of methods’ classifications of occasional words formation, the differentiation of potential words and occasional words, differences between literary and newspaper occasional words, etc.). The main methods of formation of occasional words, their grammatical categories in quantitative ratio have been described based on the language material analysis; the main spheres of their functioning are identified; the types of dictionaries of occasional words are represented. The study found that active formation of occasional words in the modern Russian language, characterized by intensive expression, evaluativity, creativity in the process of speech tends to expressiveness. The thorough analysis of occasional words suggests future prospects of their existence in the modern Russian language.

The article deals with cognitive models analysis of situations represented in mini-format texts from English educational discourse. The research is based on the texts from the coursebook «English Unlimited» Advanced. The method implied has been the cognitive modelling developed by the American linguist Dell Hymes. This includes the representation of communicative situation via meaningful constituents like Participants, Act and Sequence, Setting and Scene, Tone, Key, Instrumentalities and others. The aim of the research is to reveal the dominant components of linguo-cognitive models and their pragmatic and communicative functions. It has been revealed that the dominant components of the analyzed situations are Participants and, Key. The authors highlight these components with the help of the language means that aim at realizing emotive and affective function. It has also been revealed that the mini-format texts at the Advanced level contain more comprehensive implications, thus students must decode main themes and ideas not only with the means of the English language but also using their background knowledge and specific cognitive scenarios from their memory.

The article deals with the problem of formation of professional self-attitude among student-athletes in the process of professional training. The essence of the concept of «self-relationship» is presented, its structural components of the professional self-relationship of a sports teacher are revealed. Functions and principles of formation of professional self-attitude at the stage of semantic transition from the status of an athlete to a coach are determined. Selected educational technologies that contribute to the development of professional self-attitude of a sports teacher. The specificity of the activity of future sports teachers is noted, which implies awareness of oneself as a visitor to a certain culture. Two subsystems of self-attitude are presented in comparison according to its aspects. It is proved that professionally oriented thinking is associated with self-attitude and allows you to show individuality to achieve positive sports results.

Тhe article deals with the problem of professional training of translators in the new realities. At the heart of the theoretical basis for creating an adequate translation methodology, a model of translation is proposed as a process of permanent promotion of semantic hypotheses with their simultaneous verification. As a working model for verifying the semantic hypothesis, a four-step heuristic “algorithm” is proposed: the semantic hypothesis is rechecked for its logical and factual consistency with other statements; the initial semantic hypothesis is tested for its compliance with common sense; the initial semantic hypothesis is checked for its compliance with the scientific picture of the world; the semantic hypothesis is checked for compliance with the real sign product.

The purposes of educational activities at Russian universities include development of the students’ national self-identity and influence on their personal civic citizenship. Being involved in the educational activities at a Russian university, a person is under the influence of multicultural environment. The language-and-culture personalities can be represented with both the qualities, which are typical for bearers of the host national culture, and the features that are typical for bearers of foreign cultures. The mentioned facts have led to the scientific theme with the following problem: what are the features which a person as a bearer of their host national culture possesses, and what are the directions of the foreign-language teaching of students in the multicultural environment, created for development of the personal national self-identity? The following groups of research methods have been applied: theoretical methods (analysis and synthesis, systematization) and empirical ones (questionnaire, generalization of experience). Based on the analysis of theoretical studies we have determined the features of multicultural educational environment, influencing the language-and-culture personalities at a university, the students’ civic citizenship and the qualities, which are typical for a bearer of the host national culture. Taking into account the results of scientific researches, devoted to the classifications and descriptions of cultures (including the Russian culture), we have conducted a survey with a questionnaire, in which the students of Moscow universities participated. The summarized results of the survey have confirmed that the students possess features, which are both typical of the bearers of the host native national culture and also ones that describe bearers of other (or foreign) cultures. The analysis of empirical data has made it possible to define the directions of educational activities, applied in professional up-bringing, realizing the content of foreign-language teaching, developing the technological issues (tactics and strategies of professional behavior)