Network communication and its genres as objects of artistic representation (based on Russian literature)

The article analyses a new compositional peculiarity of modern fiction – the introduction of a text fragment related by its lexical and graphic features to one of the genres of network communication (chat, blog, electronic mail, etc.) into the structure of the literary works. The dialogue between characters, who communicate on the Net, becomes one of the stable text-forming means, performing various artistic tasks, including formation of the plotline, creating the image (atmosphere) of the time period, character images, reflection of “language taste of the epoch”, and so on. The reproduction of the main linguistic peculiarities of electronic genres, in its turn, enlivens the literary discourse to a considerable degree; the pastiche of network communication becomes one of the expressive means; the cultural dominant of our time – orientation towards visual perception of information – manifests itself. The research has revealed methods and means of transferring graphic and lexical features of genres of informal network communication in the fictional text. The main ways of reflecting the peculiarities of electronic speech are direct stylization (reproduction of alphabetic and other graphemes used in Runet) and indirect image (verbal designation of non-alphabetic graphemes), which becomes the basis of a new imagery, the tropics (laughing brackets, emoji got nervous, an offended smiley, etc.). The analysis of the features of the display of speech behavior on the Net allows to conclude about the formation of a kind of poetics for the artistic embodiment of the stable theme of modern literature – ”Man in the virtual sphere of communication and being”. The study is built on the basis of general philological analysis and specifically linguistic analysis of a fictional text (total number of analyzed works is about 60) and presents a part of the author’s separate research on the formation of Russian Internet lexis in the modern Russian language and realized within the framework of functional sociolinguistics.

The problem of determination of the key semantic components in abstracting a scientific text

The constantly growing scope of scientific publications determines the heightened interest of researchers towards abstracting as one of the methods to present a concise version of the content of the source text. This defines the relevance of this work, which discusses the problem of transition from the source text to its abstract interpretation. Based on the example of the English-language scientific article on social psychology, an attempt is made to explore the criteria for determining the key semantic components in the process of abstracting at the stage of understanding the source text. The theoretical overview of scientific papers, which cover the topic of abstracting a scientific text, as well as comparative analysis of the source text and derivative text, allowed formulating the main patterns in interpretation of the logical-semantic and discursive structure of the source text as one of the stages of the process of abstracting. It is established that in the process of understanding the text, the recipient, analyzing the links between statements, integrates them into a semantic formation, based on personal assumptions on the possible functional purpose of this text fragment. Upon completion of the process of understanding the text, the recipient deduces the knowledge on the communicative intention of the author of the text and the role of each section of the text. It appears that namely this knowledge becomes the foundation for the development of propositional model of the source text, which serves as the basis for creating the abstract text.

Canonical fragments of the strong reflection principle

For an arbitrary forcing class [Formula: see text], the [Formula: see text]-fragment of Todorčević’s strong reflection principle SRP is isolated in such a way that (1) the forcing axiom for [Formula: see text] implies the [Formula: see text]-fragment of SRP , (2) the stationary set preserving fragment of SRP is the full principle SRP , and (3) the subcomplete fragment of SRP implies the major consequences of the subcomplete forcing axiom. This fragment of SRP is consistent with CH , and even with Jensen’s principle [Formula: see text]. Along the way, some hitherto unknown effects of (the subcomplete fragment of) SRP on mutual stationarity are explored, and some limitations to the extent to which fragments of SRP may capture the effects of their corresponding forcing axioms are established.

Metaphor as a Basic Component of the Emotional Space of Texts

The article discusses the emotional space of a text fragment and ways of its verbalization. Emotions play a huge role in politics and ideology, since it is in this area that emotions and feelings of the modern generation can and should most clearly manifest themselves, in regard to both what is happening now and what awaits humanity in the future. The main purpose of the article is to identify the features of metaphorical representation of reality. Using the descriptive method as well as the methods of classification and context analysis and leaning on the work done by P. K. Anokhin, Y. Reykovsky, V. I. Shakhovsky and others, the author analyzes mechanisms and patterns of the metaphor at the intersection of the linguistic and emotional aspects and presents it as the most expressive language means. Among features of emotional speech specific for newswriting there are such patterns as changes in the architectonic structure of utterances, various repetitions, elliptical constructions, interjections and filler words, distortion of word order, violation of semantic integrity, various kinds of syntactic constructions with quoted speech, etc. However, the main indicators of emotionality in written texts are words that represent ey characteristics of the writer’s emotional attitude to her subject matter, and metaphors remain the primary tool that reflect the writer’s perception of and emotions towards what she describes. The article presents possible groups of sensory metaphors and thus provides additional theoretical and practical material for courses in the theory of language, linguistic analysis of the text, and lexicology.

Font and Colour Attributes as Manipulated in Mass Media Texts: Psycholinguistic Implications

This paper is aimed to analyse font and colour as non-verbal and paralingual components which have the capacity to influence and manipulate recipients of a message. On the basis of an extensive body of illustrative material, it has been established that by the use of colour variation, a single text fragment may be interpreted in several different ways, and may also be perceived differently by men and by women. It is demonstrated that colour and font characteristics are not exclusively graphic shells whose function is merely to record an oral statement in writing. They are semantically significant and multifunctional. It has been determined that font and colour are form-creating elements, which make possible the graphic reproduction of objects in everyday use, objects relating to reality and actuality. Variation in font and colour enable us to hypothesize that the mass media communication space is now characterized by a type of linguistic play utilizing these traits so as to render possible the projection of multiple-reading promotional texts. They also permit an economy in terms of space because of the fact that font techniques can perform formative and content functions simultaneously. Based on an experiment involving 60 participants, 30 of whom were male and 30 female, it was found that the information encoded in colour and font graphics shells is not difficult to perceive and to decipher. However, the survey found that women are more likely to perceive that information, although the difference in perception is not striking. When asked whether a sample of illustrative material stirred an appetite by using stylized fonts consisting of foods to convey a food-related message, 74 % of men and 37% of women in both articles answered in the positive, which in our study confirms the claim that food advertising promotes appetite arousal. The study also showed that most women who read the information perceive it holistically–their attention is not attracted solely by verbal and nonverbal components. On the other hand, only half of the men surveyed saw it as a whole, and almost a third of them initially noticed the verbal components first. Most participants in the experiment claimed that it took them from 5 to 10 seconds to realize that a single message could be read in several different ways. The participants who took part confirm that a single text string can be interpreted in multiple ways due to the font and colour attributes that are utilized in forming them.

TO THE QUESTION OF THE SPECIFIC ENTRY IN THE MODERN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE OF OBLIGATORY BORROWING FROM THE SPHERE OF HLS

The article is dedicated to the evolution of one word borrowed from English into Russian, which is considered as a part of a wide range of lexemes related to the sphere of “healthy lifestyle”. This word (‘fast food’) corresponds to the obligatory type of borrowings. The data of Russian Language National Corpus were used as a tool for studying frequency of its usage, the process of occurrence and distribution by type of texts. On the basis of the above mentioned data consideration and using its tools we identified 41 text fragment containing this borrowed word; herewith, negative meaning was observed in 19 cases out of 41, i.e., in 46% of the reviewed material; also, we identified 12 cases of neutral meaning, which was about 29%; positive connotation of ‘fast food’ concept was marked in 10 cases, which corresponded to 25% of cases. In our opinion, both semantic and pragmatic transformations occur in the process of adaptation of the borrowed word

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Distantly Supervised Global-to-Local Knowledge Selection for Background Based Conversation

Background Based Conversation (BBCs) have been introduced to help conversational systems avoid generating overly generic responses. In a BBC, the conversation is grounded in a knowledge source. A key challenge in BBCs is Knowledge Selection (KS): given a conversational context, try to find the appropriate background knowledge (a text fragment containing related facts or comments, etc.) based on which to generate the next response. Previous work addresses KS by employing attention and/or pointer mechanisms. These mechanisms use a local perspective, i.e., they select a token at a time based solely on the current decoding state. We argue for the adoption of a global perspective, i.e., pre-selecting some text fragments from the background knowledge that could help determine the topic of the next response. We enhance KS in BBCs by introducing a Global-to-Local Knowledge Selection (GLKS) mechanism. Given a conversational context and background knowledge, we first learn a topic transition vector to encode the most likely text fragments to be used in the next response, which is then used to guide the local KS at each decoding timestamp. In order to effectively learn the topic transition vector, we propose a distantly supervised learning schema. Experimental results show that the GLKS model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluation. More importantly, GLKS achieves this without requiring any extra annotations, which demonstrates its high degree of scalability.