Haec urbs est Thebae

This paper analyses the use of proximal deixis in Mercury’s prologue to Plautus’ Amphitruo. The study revolves around the referential ambiguity that characterizes proximal deictics such as here and this city, arguing that it contributes significantly to the blurred distinction between reality and fiction that is typical for Plautine theatre, and for his prologues in particular. The paper shows (1) that proximal deictics play a crucial role in Mercury’s creation of and transition into the fictional world; (2) that their unique referential features during audience address enable Mercury to transform the spectators’ surroundings in addition to his own; and (3) that their use underlines the similarity between Rome and fictional Thebes, which is subsequently connected to the Greek setting of Plautus’ plays and their performance during Roman festivals. Moreover, the paper claims that Mercury partly relies on proximal deixis for the inductive effect of his prologue.

Linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian legal texts

In Russian legal texts there are many various language-based phenomena identified by lawyers as “cases of indeterminacy.” Looking at these phenomena from a linguistic point of view allows one to offer their meaningful classification. This article presents such a classification. It is based on the traditional distinction between ambiguity (we discuss only lexical, structural, and referential ambiguity) and vagueness, namely: vagueness in the narrow sense, fuzziness (we distinguish between referential fuzziness, classificatory fuzziness, and lexical fuzzy expressions including hedges, fuzzy quantifiers etc.), and lack of specification. In addition to the classification itself, the article provides some semantic tests and a variety of examples that illustrate the different types of ambiguity and vagueness, including those from Russian legal texts. We particularly argue that the cases of syntactic and referential ambiguity are periodically encountered in Russian language of law. Among them, for example, the cases of coordination ambiguity, the cases of relative clause attachment ambiguity and others. At the same time, the found examples of vagueness are expectedly much more numerous. The article aims to provide lawyers with tools for the systematic search and analysis of cases of linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian texts.

Figures of contrast as a means of the ironic characterization of the characters in I. Ilf and E. Petrov’s novels “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf”

The present paper is aimed to analyse the figures of contrast used to ironically portray the characters in the novels written by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. It is worth noting that the contrast in both novels under consideration, i.e. “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf” acts both as a compositional principle for constructing a text, visual and expressive means, and as a semantic dominant of the work. It covers consistent and unequivocal speech images, the semantic and stylistic system of works, and it is reflected in numerous figures and tropes, which are organized here in two ways: opposites and contradictions. In the novels “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf”, relying on the principle of contrast, the author satirically depicts the soviet bureaucracy, people’s love of slogans and posters, the unstableness and the poverty, the pathological passion for free money, etc. The reader sees the rambling gallery where the people possess narrow interests and worthless values. It should be said that among the opposite figures, the antithesis stands out in the novels and lexical antonyms, converse terms and enantiosemy are the lexical means of its creation. Such figures of contrast as syncrisis (mukabala), paradiastole, diathesis, acrothesis, diaphora and ploka are widely used. A rather rare figure of opposition – alloise, emphasizing the dissimilarity in the similar is skillfully used by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. The authors also do not neglect the false oppositeness, when the final part of the statement seemingly contradicts the initial one in form, but in reality develops and strengthens it. Among the figures of contrast oxymoron, catachreza, antiphrasis, different types of paradox are the most common in I. Ilf and E. Petrov’s works. Paradox can be created by absurd comparisons, absurd hyperbole. The statements, in which the cause and effect relationships are violated, occur quite often, and as a result, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. The referential ambiguity of objects is based on the communicative-pragmatic paradox that relflects the discrepancy between the interlocutors’ illocutionary forces. The prospects of further research suggest the creation of a gallery of satirical linguistic portraits in the above-mentioned novels.

Ambiguity matters in linguistics and translation

Ambiguity implies that there are at least two distinct senses ascribed to one sign. It is in­herent to language and speech. In this article, I reflect on the types of ambiguity, its typology, production and effect and propose an algorithm for tackling ambiguity in translation. I posit that the choice of a translation strategy and the need for disambiguation in general depend on the type of ambiguity, its sources and character, i. e. whether ambiguity is intended or not. Intended ambiguity occurs when the speaker intentionally does not follow the logic of concep­tual clues (primes) and opts for a set of communicative strategies and linguistic means, which allow him/her to offer several possible interpretations of one event or even refer to several dif­ferent events. I explore a rarely analyzed event-referential ambiguity, which requires addi­tional conceptual information for disambiguation and, consequently, may pose a problem for translation. I argue that problems in disambiguation may occur for a variety of reasons: the translator and\or the recipient may have a wrong reference, have insufficient background knowledge to resolve the ambiguity or make wrong inferences since each recipient bears a different combination of cognitive, axiological, social, professional and gender attributes.

Chapter 2. Eye-tracking research of reading mechanisms: processing of letters, words, sen- tences and texts

In Сhapter 2 we describe how verbal information is processed at different linguistic levels, from recognizing single letters to reading and comprehension of coherent texts. We present the results of several experimental studies on reading in Russian which has specific features like Cyrillic script, rich morphology and flexible word order. First, we show some features of Cyrillic letters recognition of different font types in the experiment with invisible boundary. Our results reveal that the font type affects the recognition of crowed letters (letters in Courier New were harder to identify than the ones in Georgia), while recognition efficiency of isolat- ed letters remains at the same level. Since crowded letters imitate real reading, we claim that Georgia is more readable font than Courier New. Second, we describe the lexical, syntactic and referential ambiguity processing emphasizing the role of semantic context. Thus, we show that the processing of ambiguous words does not depend on the type of their meaning (literal or non-literal) …, and the referential ambiguity advantage effect. Third, we compare the process- ing of literal and non-literal expressions in Russian. We try to tease apart different approaches to idioms as well as to give a better explanation of what units may be stored in the mental lex- icon and how syntactic processing may proceed. Finally, we demonstrate the influence of the text type, functional style and reading skills on text processing. We show that the text type is among the readability categories and it influences the effect of reading perspective: eye-track- ing parameters of reading a static text (descriptive sentences) and a dynamic text (sequence of events following swiftly on one another) differ a lot.