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The article discusses changes in scientific communication that are related to its transfer to a digital environment. The authors aim to reveal structural and semiotic transformations that the genre of scientific article undergoes in the context of transition from paper to a digital format. To this end, the characteristics of the genre in its traditional printed format are compared to the characteristics of scientific articles as they are presented in the electronic versions of journals. The results of the analysis demonstrate that these changes affected both genre features per se (e.g. the abstract has acquired a visual form) and the “genre shell”, i.e. an instrumental interface that facilitates the recipient’s interaction with the text. The transformation of the genre characteristics found in a scientific article requires that scholars expand their competencies, both cognitive and technical, since this factor predetermines the effectiveness of scientific communication. As for the recipient, the technological context of a scientific article on the Internet provides readers with additional opportunities for interacting with the text through the common use of affordances. Being “intermediaries” between the properties of the text and the reader’s capabilities, affordances are widely used in the procedures of meaning translation. At the same time, a scientific article becomes a typical Internet object that is subject to all actions taken to any other object in a digital environment. The authors conclude that the next research stage can cover the examination of the reader’s interaction with a scientific article on the Internet, as well as the influence of new genre features and affordances on the recipient’s perception and interpretation of the text.

The paper discusses the complex genre of tourist booklet as a fixed type of multimodal text that serves in a communicative situation of promoting a tourist product. This genre is a semiotically complex phenomenon, which conveys information through different semiotic systems. The methodological issues are posed as to a perspective model of genre analysis that would take into account the multimodal nature of genres. The author points to major hindrances that an analyst faces when doing multimodal analysis. The study focuses on discovering mechanisms of the interplay between verbal and visual components on semantic and formal levels, as well as showing how the elements of multimodal analysis can be targeted at various genre parameters. The booklets (85 items) for the study were collected in 2007–2019 in Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia and other countries. Methodologically, the paper draws on speech genre theory, semiotics, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis. The claims are advanced that the tourist booklet has both obligatory and optional features, the visual component being obligatory. It is revealed that the colours of visuals can have factual and modal meanings embedded in them; photos convey precedent meanings; while using different semiotic codes, visual and verbal elements join the convergence relations and, thus, provide for genre coherence. The complex genre includes intertextual links between genres in its structure. These links may be of cross-code nature, since they are established between the elements of different semiotic systems, verbal and non-verbal. The conclusion is drawn that a consistent analytical model for multimodal genres has to be designed.

This paper discusses the mechanisms of discursive construction of Russia’s international relations and intends to identify such mechanisms in the media. Using the framework that is informed by social constructionism and Critical Discourse Analysis, the authors view international relations as a discursive phenomenon, which is constructed through a specific repertoire of pragmalinguistic means. Drawing on the Russian foreign minister’s speech and its representations in Russian newspapers, the authors conduct a case study analysis and reveal that the representations of international relations undergo recontextualisation in the media as compared to the representations in proper diplomatic discourse. The newspapers offer avenues for ideologically charged interpretations through chronotope representations and the strategy of emotionalisation. The media also widen the discursive context of international relations by way of the inclusion of heterogeneous social actors, which are grouped in a way that discloses a conflict potential in their relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores discursive constructions of us- and them-groups within the context of the debates on the placement of the US anti-ballistic missile defence system in Central and Eastern Europe. The study is based on the data collected by the authors in the Polish and Russian press (2008–2009). Using the framework that is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis, the authors define strategies and specific linguistic means used to represent ‘us’ and ‘them’ and provide a picture of chronological transformations that these representations undergo in the investigated newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]