Transformation of scientific genres in the context of scientometric strategies

The transformation of scientific genres in the context of the general digitalization of modern culture is considered. It is shown that the speech genre content of this process is based on the mechanisms of generation and transformation of the text of two types, the interpretation of which can be useful in order to better understand the nature, tasks and tools of scientometry at this stage, and in order to better understand the speech genre structure of scientific speech. Firstly, the structural requirements for articles and monographs indexed in scientometric systems (Scopus, WoS, DOAJ, RSCI, etc.) are approved and streamlined, and thereby our knowledge of what an article is from its structure (i.e. knowledge about the genre of the article). Secondly, the requirements of indexing systems lead to the fact that the texts of articles change, they are “written differently”, and sometimes redone after appropriate recommendations from publishers. The points highlighted in scientometric systems can be understood as signs that an article must comply with in order to be assigned to the “speech genre of a scientific article”. The largest quantitative indicators for these items are indicators of how close to the core of the genre this or that text will turn out.

An International scholarly conference “Everyday speech as the object of lexicography” (the Thirteenth Shmelev Readings)

This article contains a chronicle of the International scholarly conference “Everyday Speech as the Object of Lexicography (The Thirteenth Shmelev Readings)”, devoted to the different aspects of the study of the everyday speech, such as description of its phonetic, lexical, grammatical and stylistic features in explanatory dictionaries.

“Stay with me. Talk to me”: reader interaction strategies in modern poetry

The article is devoted to the consideration of a poetic text as a communicative phenomenon with a high impact potential. The author defines the features of poetic communication, which is both mass and interpersonal, and its main goal, which is the poet’s desire to communicate author’s vision of the world and thereby change the picture of the reader’s world, achieving empathy from it. Based on the understanding of the speech strategy as a cognitive communication plan, a program for generating and perceiving speech, the author talks about the fundamental reversibility of text-generating and interpretative strategies and offers own classification of strategies and tactics that are most often used in modern poetry. In this classification, the main communicative strategies of self-presentation and rapprochement with the reader are associated with auxiliary discursive strategies of actualizing, dramatizing and dialogizing the text and programming interpretations by tactics for highlighting objects and situations using sound “gestures”, pointing to the referent, framing, directly introducing the reader into the communicative context, attracting the recipient’s attention through appeals and pragmatic instructions, interrogation, and some others. Particular attention is paid to the multimodality of interactions and its specific manifestations in poetic discourse. The study is based on the material of Russian poetry of the 1980- 2000s using the methods of intent and discourse analysis.

Legitimation strategies and tactics in corporate discourse

This article proposes a typology of strategies and tactics of legitimation. The linguistic interpretation of the concepts of “legitimacy” and “legitimation”, developed in the article, is based on the following theoretical sources: on the notions of legitimacy and discursive mechanisms for its maintenance, established in the humanities; to the work of linguists studying the discursive mechanisms of legitimation in line with critical discourse analysis (CDA); to the works of domestic discourses, which analyze the means of ensuring credibility and trust in the discourse (V.B. Kashkin, N.S. Ryadovaya, A.A. Malyshev). Following the CDA experts, the author understands legitimation as discursive practices (genres, strategies and tactics) of ensuring a positive attitude of society to a social actor and its discourse. The material used was 120 corporate texts posted on the websites of companies, in corporate publications, in image booklets, and image and information materials of companies posted in the media were also used. A pragmalinguistic analysis of the texts of commercial and state structures allowed the author of the article to identify the key strategies of legitimation, describe tactics, language means of implementing one of the basic strategies of legitimation – the strategy of positive self-presentation. In general, the analysis of the texts showed that the CD uses two main strategies to ensure legitimation: the strategy of creating images of loyal target audiences (external and internal) and the strategy of building a positive image of the corporation itself. The article focuses on the second strategy, on the tactics and language means of its implementation. A wide range of identified tactics testifies to the importance of the legitimation process for corporations. It was also found that most of the texts providing legitimation relate to PR texts, which allows us to conclude that discursive PR practices are standard ways to ensure legitimation.

Prosodiac strategies of reading and oral narrative

This paper is aimed at the analysis of discourse incompleteness in sound speech. The main means of indicating that the current statement is not final is prosody. The preliminary analysis shows that various genres and styles of spoken speech – spontaneous speech, prepared speech, artistic reading, and radio newscasters’ reading – as well as various social categories of speakers use the prosody of incompleteness to different extent. The rate of demonstrating incompleteness in a text can serve as a parameter of genre, style, or a speaker him/herself. Young women even in prepared speech (for instance, in a scientific paper at a conference) are very eager in showing that the continuation of the speech is in its process, whereas professional readers of both genders practically do not employ the indices of incompleteness. In this paper, a notion of incompleteness factor has been put forward. It mirrors the frequency of incompleteness instances in a text, or in a working corpus of texts. Incompleteness factor as an instrument of sound speech analysis is tested on five fragments taken from a working corpus specifically set up for this investigation. The fragments exemplify the following parameters of texts and speakers: style, genre, gender, and age of a speaker. The analysis shows that sound speech of young females has a higher incompleteness factor than the one of males, or older females. At the same time, the radio newscasters reading has a higher incompleteness factor than the artistic reading.

More than half a century under the umbrella of communication strategies

The article is a preface for a thematic issue devoted to the study of communication in terms of strategies and tactics of speech behavior. The author sees the reasons for the strong attention to the analysis of speech behavior in anthropocentrism, which has become the leading approach in linguistic research in recent decades. The concept of strategy allows us to comprehend the individual speech actions of the speaker as the implementation of a consistent cognitive plan. A brief insight into the history of the study of communicative strategies and tactics abroad and in Russia is presented. The main fields in communicative research are indicated, where the concepts of strategy and tactics are used. It is noted that most of the research is devoted to the description of strategies and tactics in specific social spheres or institutions and the means of their language manifestation. A review of articles in the thematic issue allows you to see the variety of possible applications of the theory of strategic communication to the analysis of modern discursive practices, including bilingual ones. As one can judge by the publications of the thematic issue, the concept of communication strategy is also used to analyze media, marketing, corporate communications and literary text. It is concluded that the diversity of aspects and approaches in Russian and foreign works testifies to the research potential of the concept itself and the possibilities of its application to various areas of communication

Conceptual compression of a text as a component of communicative competence

The article presents an example how to work with students on the text conceptual compression. The skill of compression and transferring the information of a text is a solid part of communicative competence and it seems to be crucial in the process of verbal communication including professional conversation. There was conducted a beta testing among the 1st year university students in order to evaluate the skills to compress and transfer information. The examination shows that the secondary school graduates do not perform well being asked to compress the information of a text, they are not able to use adequate ways to transform the texts, the final text product does not include all vital conceptual details. The subject group of students was offered a special training, which included a number of exercises aimed on teaching to compress texts. The article also includes the designed course which was applied. As the result of such a focused instruction on text compression studies, the students learned how to highlight the key topics and to use the needed ways of compression. What is more, the final products appeared to be more logical. Hence the proposed research leads to the conclusion that not only such specially designed training is vitally needed, but also that the designed by the researchers exercises are effective.

Strategy of positive mediatization of war in Vietnam (based on newspapers "Pravda" and "Komsomol’skaya pravda", 1965)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the strategy of positive mediatization of the Vietnamese War in the Soviet media. The theoretical basis of the work is the concept of mediatization of politics developed as a term in the era of global informatization when the perception of social conflicts and their evaluation are actively formed by the mass-media. The projection of this concept to the events of 1965-1973 allows identifying the features of coverage of the military conflict in the Soviet media which are the mouthpiece of the official authorities. The material for the research is the newspaper resources in "Pravda" and "Komsomol'skaya pravda" for 1965 which is the starting point of the beginning of the USSR’s military assistance to fighting Vietnam. Two polar substrategies of mediatization of the image of Vietnam are found and characterized, based on opposition of ours and theirs: the substrategy of the heroization of the Vietnamese people and the substrategy of the accusation and condemnation of the external aggressor – the United States. The opposition of ours and theirs is value oriented. The representation of ours and theirs dichotomy by means of a totalitarian language has identified hypertrophied and simplified evaluation in the designation of ours and theirs. The first group is characterized by an absolutely positive evaluation, the second is absolutely negative. Among the linguistic means of implementing the substrategy of accusation and condemnation of the external aggressor, evaluative epithets, metaphorical nominations, political labels with negative evaluative connotation, and slogan headings of the accusatory and condemning type are found. The substrategy of the heroization of the Vietnamese people has formed a general idea of the national character of the Vietnamese. The positive mediatization of the Vietnam War has resulted in the enrichment of the meaning of the concept of Vietnam. In the Russian linguistic consciousness, there formed positively estimated views about the Vietnamese as a friendly, hardworking, heroic nation, capable of defending their independence.

Xenonarrative texts in literary and narrative communication: functional and pragmatic approach

The article is devoted to the pragmatic analysis of literary xeno-narrative – a special type of literary and narrative communication that implements specific communicative functions and strategies aimed at discursive processing of cultural and linguistic otherness. The discursive processing of cultural otherness is understood as a process of verbal reflection of foreign cultural experience in literary xeno-narrative based on multilevel language means and understanding of the cultural and conventional norms of another linguistic culture in order to minimize the stress of intercultural adaptation. The paper defines the essential features of xeno-narrative, defined as a literary narrative, thematically immersed in the discourse of intercultural interaction, pragmatically reflecting the method of discursive processing of cultural foreignness and intentionally aimed at verbal transfer of mental experience from the author to the reader in the format of literary and narrative communication. The use of discursive, contextual and intent analysis of narrative allowed us to identify functionally and pragmatically determined linguistic and cultural conventions means of discursive processing in xeno-narrative. The following functions of xenonarrative were determined: minimizing the stress of cultural adaptation and verbal transfer of mental experience. In addition, three author’s strategies in literary xeno-narrative were described. The otherness identification strategy includes several trajectories for evaluating the friend / foe categories: “friend” can be connected both positively and negatively, “foe” is hostile at the initial stage of adaptation, but assimilation mitigates negative evaluation semes. The strategy of language acculturation is analyzed in the focus of the secondary language personality formation. The subjectification strategy is aimed at the most complete perception of the system of author's meanings and images, as well as at the reader’s emotional involvement and empathy. Conclusions in the work are made on the basis of the texts of literary xeno-narratives “Die undankbare Fremde” by I. Brezhna and “Girl in translation” by J. Kwok, as well as the electronic corps of Russian, English and German readers' reviews.

Running out of words: tactics for maintaining conversation among Russian-German bilinguals

The study combines analysis of social interaction between bilingual RussianGerman speakers competent in the two languages to different degrees with assessment of the levels of oral and written proficiency of the young Russian Germans who came as small children to Germany or were born here. This is a part of a larger longitudinal project dedicated to the linguistic integration of the Russian Germans in Germany conducted since shortly after their arrival as repartees to the historical homeland. The communication took place at the family home after 25 years of immigration. It was interesting to discover bilingual practices and means that are in use to achieve certain goals of communication. Questions were asked about different aspects of their life and their attitudes toward the previous and actual situation. The peculiarities of the oral and written German as well as of the oral Russian and of the ability to read were tested and analyzed. The results obtained allow to understand bilingual development of children, now young adults, without systematical support for the literacy in the Russian language. Even if they hear a lot of Russian from their relatives, it is not important to maintain the language and they do not make additional efforts to do it. This is an outcome of the family language policy and the consequences of parents’ comunicative practices.