Discourse of corruption in the Russian society

Objective: to study the socio-cultural and legal nature of the corruption phenomenon in a discursive and communicative context.Methods: the methodological basis of the article is the synthesis of the discursive and communicative theory of J. Habermas and W. Krawietz’s integrative theory of legal reality, focusing on the interdisciplinary study of corruption as an interdisciplinary category, taking into account not only objective, but also subjective components. This determined the choice of research methods (comparative, hermeneutic, and discursive methods).Results: corruption as a phenomenon and the interdisciplinary category reflecting it is determined by social, cultural and psychological factors of the legal reality development. Acting as a complex legal archetype, it defines the value attitudes of consciousness and behavior of the legal communication participants, orienting them to carry out actions aimed at satisfying individual (less often group and social) interests, even if they contradict the law. Corrupt behavior is perceived by a large part of the Russian society as a model of hierarchical interaction of the legal communication subjects, the purpose of which, according to the addressee, is to increase the effectiveness of the addressee’s activities. In addition, corruption is becoming an informal means of “liberation” from the legal requirements, rigid and unfair, according to some representatives of the society. In these conditions, the success of the institutional fight against corruption can be achieved only if this fight involves not only improvement of anti-corruption legislation, but also countering shadow norms, creating a system of anti-incentives for corrupt behavior, including ideologically, through the formation of value attitudes of citizens to reject corrupt practices as unpatriotic and harmful to the rule of law and the legal culture of the society as a whole.Scientific novelty: for the first time in Russian jurisprudence, a study of the category of corruption in the communicative and discursive aspect was conducted.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific and pedagogical activities when considering the issues of the essence and content of the Russian legal reality, in the anti-corruption activities of state and municipal bodies, as well as in anti-corruption education.

Modes of subjectivation, ethos and the “Pathway of passions”: a theoretical-methodological apparatus for rhetorical analysis

The text argues for the possibility of multimodal argumentative analyses. The main objective of this essay was to speculate on how an orator's modes of subjectivation, discursively materialized by ethos, provide evidence for the persuasion of audiences. In order to do that, we use the “Pathway of passions” theory as a theoretical-methodological analysis apparatus. The object of study was the official campaign video of the current state deputy for the State of São Paulo, Arthur Moledo do Val, published on the YouTube website, in 2018. The results of the work indicate that the analysis of multimodal texts is essential at the present time, since the most varied social practices, such as politics, have been using these materialities to persuade. It is also clear that ethos gains more argumentative relevance within a virtual communicative context. Furthermore, the rhetorical perspective of argumentation, transdisciplinary since its genesis, can provide the necessary means to carry out such an undertaking

The phraseology of wine and olive oil tasting notes

Specialized genres are bound to the communicative context of their discourse community. However, certain genres extend beyond one specific domain, remaining unchanged at different linguistic levels across domains. That seems to be the case of wine and olive oil tasting notes since both analyze and evaluate sensory descriptions. The present study aims at describing and comparing lexical chunks of wine and olive oil tasting notes at a semantic level to show if there is variation in the same genre across domains; we will not only describe, classify and compare lexical chunks, but also identify the way this knowledge is structured and construed in the same genre in both domains. We will test our methodology in a corpus of English tasting notes from both genres written by three different writer profiles: professionals, amateurs and wineries/mills. Our results will be useful for scholars as well as technical writers when writing tasting notes.

Reasoning Talk at Chinese Families’ Dinner Table: Across Three Generations and Different Communicative Contexts

This study examines the feature of reasoning talk used by 37 Chinese families at the dinner table across three generations with the background of co-parenting and in consideration of different communicative contexts. Drawing upon Hasan’s semantic framework, reasons were mainly coded as logical or social types. We categorize the communicative context of reasoning talk into contextualized (meal-related) and decontextualized topics. When the proportion of social reasoning was found slightly higher than that of logical reasoning, the families’ reasoning talk account for only 3.85% of the total language. Specifically, the count of mothers’ total reasoning talk was significantly above other family members, while there were no significant differences among the other participants. The effect of the communicative contexts on family members’ social reasoning was found. The reasoning talk grounded on local rules (family-made rules) and coercive power occurred significantly more frequently in contextualized than decontextualized context. A higher rate of local-rule grounded reasoning talk of all family members appeared in contextualized than decontextualized context, and this gap was particularly obvious among mothers. These findings reveal the significant role of mothers in family communications and confirm the pedagogical values of decontextualized communicative context for promoting children’s learning opportunities at the dinner table.

The Origins of Trust: Humans’ Reliance on Communicative Cues Supersedes Firsthand Experience During the Second Year of Life

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred—like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal search paradigm in four main studies and three supplementary studies (N = 208). Infants and toddlers first see where a reward is, and then an in-formant communicates to them that it is in another location. We use this general experimental set-up to assess the role of age, informants’ knowledge, cue’s familiarity, and communicative context on trust in communicated information. Results reveal that infants and toddlers quickly trust familiar and novel communicative cues from well-informed adults. When searching for the reward, they follow a well-informed adults’ communicative cue, even when it contradicts what they just saw. Further-more, infants are less likely to be guided by familiar and novel cues from poorly informed adults than toddlers. Thus, reliance on communication is calibrated during early childhood, up to the point of overriding evidence about informants’ knowledge. Moreover, toddlers trust much more strongly a novel cue when it is used in a communicative manner. Toddlers’ trust cannot be explained by mere compliance: it is highly reduced when communicated information is pitted against what participants currently see. Thus, humans’ strong tendency to rely on familiar and novel communicative cues emerges in infancy, and intensifies during the second year of life.

The New Consul and the Eagles of Jupiter: Poetics and Propaganda in Claudian’s Preface to the Panegyric for Mallius Theodorus

This article proposes an interpretation of Claudian’s preface to his Panegyric for Mallius Theodorus that places the poem in the communicative context of its recitation and in the literary frame of the panegyric. An analysis of the political messages in both poems, the panegyric and its brief ‘paratext’, reveals that the preface consistently uses the myth of the two eagles of Jupiter to indicate symbolically that the new consul is still upholding ‘genuine’ Hellenic culture in the West. This interpretation illustrates how Claudian’s poems for the new consul of 399 assume the Greek cultural heritage to be a part of the Roman identity and that they play a significant role in the poet’s agenda between 397–400, by progressively unveiling the anti-Byzantinism of the Western court.

AXIOLOGICAL FEATURES OF CONDITIONAL SENTENCES IN ENGLISH

This article deal with the analysis of the axiological potential of conditional sentences in the English language. The aim of the work is to reveal axiological features of conditional sentences in English in terms of expressing values in a communicative setting. In order to achieve the aim of the study, the following tasks are set: review of related literature; analysis of axiological characteristics of English conditional sentences; identification and classification of values expressed by conditional sentences in English. The results of research show that conditional sentences in English can: a) contribute to the verbalization of axiological picture of the world; b) verbalize some basic human values as power, benevolence, security, achievement, hedonism, self-direction, stimulation, conformity, universalism in a specific communicative context; c) express values with the help of whole syntactic meaning.

Communicative deviations of respondents in political video interviews in Ukrainian and German

The research has the objective to establish the peculiarities of communicative deviations as a cognitive and at the same time discursive phenomenon in Ukrainian- and German-language video interviews from the viewpoint of respondents. The procedure of the research involves the integrated application of methods and techniques of pragmatics, deviatology and communicative linguistics. A new methodological basis has been developed for the reconstruction of communicative deviations using discourse analysis, namely for the reconstruction of a single event in two discursive environments, determining the communicative context and communication of interview in compared languages. The results of the research allow us to identify the features of communicative deviations in political interviews at the external, internal structural levels and at the situational level. The conclusions of the research indicate that the types of communicative deviations in political video interviews are universal in Ukrainian and German, but reflect national and cultural specifics given the peculiarities of both languages and each linguoculture, as well as existing realias, norms, conventions, maxims and rules of communication.

Invoking divine blessing

This study explores the speech act of congratulation in university graduation notebooks, a new communicative context in Jordan. Using the concept of the pragmeme as a situated speech act, a total of 1064 congratulatory messages, found in 35 notebooks, were analyzed. The analysis demonstrated that the cultural concept of baraka ‘blessing’ plays a central role in the Arabic congratulation speech act. Embedded in its production are other speech acts such as compliments and advice, sociocultural beliefs and concepts such as fatalism and collectivism, and sociocultural practices such as naqout ‘money given as a gift’. Invoking these values and beliefs when performing congratulations was accomplished through ritualistic religious invocations, formulaic expressions, reference to collective identity, and acts of material support, showing how this Arabic speech act is situated in sociocultural beliefs and values.

Knowledge in Images and Sounds: Informative, Narrative and Aesthetic Analysis of the Video for MOOC

The virtual courses developed by higher education institutions incorporate the video format as one of the most used resources in the delivery of their online training offer. Within the different types of audiovisual productions found in MOOCs, the introductory or presentation video of the courses has become an illustrative piece of the new edu-communicative context of distance education, when articulating, in the same work, informative, didactic, and advertising content. The objective of this research work is to study the triple communicative nature of this innovative format following a specific methodology of audiovisual textual analysis. For this, 420 videos of this type of promotional video, belonging to 105 universities and educational centres that have developed MOOC courses for the Miríadax platform, are analysed. After checking the results of the formal characteristics, content structures, discursive techniques, and audiovisual language components of the videos, it is concluded that they are mostly pieces linked to the staging style of the classroom, but that, by enriching the visual appearance of a master lesson with audiovisual resources, take advantage of the narrative, aesthetic, and creative potential of audiovisual and advertising communication to capture the attention of the student-spectator, inform about the characteristics of the courses, offer valuable educational content, and generate an image of the brand for the institution responsible for producing the course.