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The article discusses ancient Chinese political and legal thought. In the modern world, such political and legal teachings as Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism have gained wide spread and influence. They occupy a special place in the spiritual culture of China and the life of modern Chinese society. The PRC is at the stage of further modernization of Chinese society, which was initiated by the reforms of the 1970s. Traditional for China in any era of its development has been the appeal to the achievements of Chinese civilization. One of the problems considered by the representatives of ancient Chinese political and legal thought is the problem of state administration. Among the various methods of government, ancient Chinese thinkers singled out, first of all, rewards and punishments. Within the framework of the political and legal views of ancient China, there were several approaches to rewards and punishments. The Confucians opposed the administration of the state on the basis of laws containing severe punishments. They believed that government should be based not on punishments, but on rewards. Supporters of Taoism recognized the method of rewards and punishments in government, but treated it negatively. In Mohism, ideas are expressed about the need to combine violent methods of control with moral forms of influence on people. Legalists come to the unequivocal conclusion that punishments are the most effective method of governing society. The article concludes that the system of severe punishments developed by the Legalists underwent changes in the direction of mitigation and connection with the main postulates of Confucianism during the Han Empire. A system of severe punishments, coercion and violence, in a somewhat relaxed version, became the basis for the work of government bodies in subsequent centuries of Chinese history., Статья посвящена исследованию древнекитайской политико-правовой мысли. В современном мире большое распространение и влияние получили такие политико-правовые учения, как конфуцианство, даосизм и легизм. Особое место они занимают в духовной культуре Китая и жизни современного китайского общества. КНР находится на этапе дальнейшей модернизации китайского общества, начало которой было положено реформами 70-х гг. прошлого века. Традиционным для Китая в любую эпоху его развития являлось обращение к достижениям китайской цивилизации. Одной из проблем, рассматриваемых представителями древнекитайской политико-правовой мысли, является проблема управления государством. Среди различных методов управления государством древнекитайские мыслители выделяли, прежде всего, награды и наказания. В рамках политико-правовых воззрений Древнего Китая сложилось несколько подходов к наградам и наказаниям. Конфуцианцы выступали против управления государством на основе законов, содержащих суровые наказания. Они считали, что управление государством должно строиться на основе не наказаний, а наград. Сторонники даосизма признавали метод наград и наказаний в управлении государством, но относились к нему отрицательно. В моизме высказываются идеи о необходимости сочетания насильственных методов управления с нравственными формами воздействия на людей. Легисты приходят к однозначному выводу, что наказания являются наиболее эффективным методом управления обществом. В статье делается вывод, что разработанная легистами система суровых наказаний претерпела изменения в направлении смягчения и соединения с основными постулатами конфуцианства в период империи Хань. Система суровых наказаний, принуждения и насилия в некотором смягченном варианте была положена в основу деятельности органов управления в последующие века китайской истории.

The article presents a model of communicative alignment in pragmatic markers (PM) use in Russian everyday dialogical communication. The main objectives are to check whether speakers coordinate their linguistic behavior not just with the use of lexemes or grammar forms or constructions, but also with PMs and how this actually works. We suppose that the use of PM by one of the speakers in the dialogue may increase the chances that the same PM will be used by the other speaker. In a Russian speech corpus "One Day of Speech" there were found 57 macro-episodes of communication where the PM koroche / koroche govorya was used by multiple speakers (46 episodes with 2 speakers using the PM, 11 – with 3 speakers). The analysis of PM use applying the system of quantitative parameters, worked out by the authors, has enabled them to note, that medium frequency of PM use rises when the number of speakers increases. PM used by speaker 1 is repeated by speaker 2, thus inducing speaker 3 to use the same PM, which influences the speech of the first two speakers respectively. The data analysis allows us to conclude that the original hypothesis of alignment in PMs has been proved for the marker we studied.

We discussed the increasing interest in the use of technical means for voting in elections and referendums with a gradual transition to electronic voting. Our article deals with the peculiarities of the experiment on the organization and conduct of remote electronic voting in the elections of deputies of the Moscow City Duma of the seventh convocation, scheduled for September 8, 2019. In addition, the article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of electronic voting, offers recommendations on eliminating some risks associated with the use of this type of electronic voting. The received results of the experiment will allow to define directions of the further work on perfection of legal regulation of introduction in selective process of modern digital technologies. In case of positive results, practical and technological solutions can be developed, which will ensure further development of the remote electronic voting system in Russia.

Pragmatic markers are an integral part of spontaneous spoken speech, however, they still have no systematic scientific description. These speech elements perform mostly pragmatic functions and are characterized by almost complete absence (or significant weakening) of lexical and/or grammatical meaning. The frequency of pragmatic markers in speech exceeds that of almost all content words. Because of that, for the improvement of many current NLP tasks, it is very important to obtain proper systematization of pragmatic markers and to develop effective and reliable schemes for their annotation. In current research, we describe the preliminary set of pragmatic markers categories and present the results of two stages of their pilot annotation made independently by a group of experts.

Idioms are said to mirror the culture of the language. As it happens with most culturally-determined language aspects, idioms pose great difficulties for learners, to the point where some teachers avoid dealing with idioms in the classroom altogether. Prodromou speaks of an “idiomatic paradox”, where native speakers rely on idioms in spoken discourse, while even advanced learners struggle, finding them elusive. However, many scholars insist on teaching idioms in an EFL classroom. Celce-Murcia proposes a communicative competence model, where one of the competences (figurative) rests on the ability to use idioms. CEFR includes idiomatic expressions in its band descriptions. All this makes a case for including idioms in academic syllabi.

The paper explores the complex process of listening comprehension in Russian EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. I review the existing scholarly writing on the top-down and bottom-up strategies that listeners employ (knowingly or subconsciously) to understand the acoustic input. From the bottom-up perspective, listening comprehension is a linear process occurring in consecutive stages, each providing output that later serves as input for the next stage. In other words, listeners start by decoding phonemes and then move on to the higher levels such as words, utterances, etc., with meaning being the final step. However, empirical evidence shows that there are limitations to this rather linear approach. As recognized in Buck, listening comprehension does not occur in a fixed sequence. It seems that different types of processing may occur simultaneously. Moreover, successful decoding of the meaning does not always depend on the acoustic input itself but also on the context, communicative situation, and the listener’s general knowledge about the world. The processing that takes these factors into consideration is top-down. It relies heavily on the listener’s background knowledge. Finally, I build a case towards an interactive model of listening which seems to describe the actual comprehension process more accurately, since both top-down and bottom-up processing occur simultaneously and complement each other. I then proceed to analyze the common listening activities found in popular EFL course books and demonstrate the existing bias towards top-down listening skills development at the expense of the bottom-up processing.

Borrowed from Aristotle, the dichotomy of male and female principles is widely exploited by representatives of the Silver Age to talk about the universe, being and artistic creation. Based on the analysis of the incarnations of the two fundamental principles in Zinaida Gippius’s poetry, the article shows how, hidden behind the apparent conformism, her system of poetic images undermines the androcentric foundations of the philosophical-artistic thought of her time. It is shown that instability of gendered boundaries are achieved through the poet’s use of two processes: the first consists in the association of the distinctive qualities and attributes of one principle with the bearers characteristic of the opposite principle; the second brings together, in a single phenomenon or in one being, the specific qualities of the two principles. Special attention in the study is paid to the use of grammatical genders and, especially to the neutral gender to which Gippius gives, in her poetic world, the cosmogonic role of chaos. In conclusion, it is pointed out that the association of chaos with the neutral leads to the attenuation of the initial dichotomy and to the rehabilitation of the feminine principle.

On the basis of printed materials in Russian, part of the Merezhkovskys’ private library in Paris, a few biographical facts about Zinaida Gippius are specified, alongside dating the foundation of the aforementioned library. Thus, the article contributes to the study of the Russian-language part of D.S. Merezhkovsky and Z.N. Gippius’ Paris library. Of particular value to researchers of Russia abroad as a special phenomenon and Gippius’ works of the émigré period are her notes on the margins, allowing to reconstruct her reflection of certain literary facts. The article also restores the history of some entries in the Merezhkovskys’ home library. The study of library entries allows to clarify and establish the sources Gippius used for a short story about the Men-of-God sect He Has Descended (1907), the articles Bread of Life (1901) and Infatuation (1904) as well as the poems On Faith and Naked Thoughts (1902). On the basis of D.S. Merezhkovsky’s notes important additions to the creative history and interpretation of his novel Peter and Alexis from the Christ and the Antichrist trilogy, as well as the study L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, are made. The final conclusion reflects the particular importance of the Merezhkovskys’ library in Paris, its composition and the exact time of its formation for the study of Gippius’ works, considering a small number of her own testimonies about her creative process.

The paper presents the distribution of pragmatic markers (PM) of Russian everyday speech in two types of discourse: dialogical and monologic. PMs are an essential part of any oral discourse, therefore, quantitative data on their distribution are necessary for solving both theoretical and practical tasks related to studies of speech communication, as well as for translation and teaching Russian as a foreign language. The article describes samples from two speech corpora: “One Speaker’s Day” (ORD corpus, consisting of mostly dialogue speech, the annotated subcorpus containing 321 504 tokens) and “Balanced Annotated Text Library” (SAT corpus, which consists only of monologues, the annotated subcorpus containing 50 128 tokens). Besides, it presents statistical data of PM distributions obtained for 60 basic (invariant) markers, PMs common in both dialogue and monologue (for example, hesitative marker such as vot, tam, tak) are identified, as well as those that are more typical for monologues (boundary markers like znachit, nu vot, vs’o) or dialogues (‘xeno’-markers like takoj, grit; and meta-communicative markers vidish’, (ja) ne znaju). Special attention is paid to PMs usage both in different communication situations and in speech of different sociolects.

The paper presents recent results obtained within the ongoing project dedicated to the study of Russian pragmatic markers. Pragmatic markers are obligatory elements of natural speech in any language; moreover, they are considered to be functionally important for speech production and overcoming inevitable speech difficulties. A correct understanding of use and functions of pragmatic markers is a prerequisite for solution of many applied tasks related to speech technologies. The research is carried out on the data of two speech corpora — ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech known as “One Day of Speech” corpus and SAT corpus “Balanced Annotated Collection of Texts”, which consists primarily of monologues. The article describes the database of Russian pragmatic markers designed to support both linguistic and pragmatic studies of spoken Russian and the development of speech technologies for everyday discourse. Besides, it presents actual statistical data on pragmatic markers distribution in natural speech depending on different factors.

This paper explores how Cornish national and regional identity is construed in works of fiction: W. Graham’s Poldark literary series (1945-1946) and its BBC screen adaptation (2015-2019). The research looks into the linguistic and narrative representations of nationalism and regionalism in Cornwall and demonstrates how Cornish national identity is represented. We focus on how the plot, the setting, and the means of characterization are employed to build a sense of Cornish national identity.

The paper is devoted to the problem of modeling general-language frequency using data of large Russian corpora. Our goal is to develop a methodology for forming a consolidated frequency list which in the future can be used for assessing lexical complexity of Russian texts. We compared 4 frequency lists developed from 4 corpora (Russian National Corpus, ruTenTen11, Araneum Russicum III Maximum, Taiga). Firstly, we applied rank correlation analysis. Secondly, we used the measures “coverage” and “enrichment”. Thirdly, we applied the measure “sum of minimal frequencies”. We found that there are significant differences between the compared frequency lists both in ranking and in relative frequencies. The application of the “coverage” measure showed that frequency lists are by no means substitutable. Therefore, none of the corpora in question can be excluded when compiling a consolidated frequency list. For a more detailed comparison of frequency lists for different frequency bands, the ranked frequency list, based on RNC data, was divided into 4 equal parts. Then 4 random samples (containing 20 lemmas from each quartile) were formed. Due to the wide range of values, accepted by ipm measure, relative frequency values are difficult to interpret. In addition, there are no reliable thresholds separating high-frequency, mid-frequency, and low-frequency lemmas. Meanwhile, to assess the lexical complexity of texts, it is useful to have a convenient way of distributing lemmas with certain frequencies over the bands of the frequency list. Therefore, we decided to assign lemmas “Zipf-values”, which made the frequency data interpretable because the range of measure values is small. The result of our work will be a publicly accessible reference resource called “Frequentator”, which will allow to obtain interpretable information about the frequency of Russian words.

The paper deals with new research findings on pragmatic markers (PMs) use in spoken Russian. The study is based on two speech corpora: “One Day of Speech” (ORD, which contains mainly dialogues), and “Balanced Annotated Collection of Texts” (SAT, which contains only monologues). We explored two annotated subcorpora consisting of 321,504 tokens and 50,128 tokens respectively. The main results are as follows: 1) the extended frequency lists of PMs were formed; 2) PMs, that are frequently used in both types of speech, were identified (e.g., hesitation markers like tam ‘there’, tak ‘that way’), 3) the list of PMs, used primarily in monologue speech, was compiled (in this list there are such PMs as boundary ones znachit ‘well’, nu vot ‘well er’, vs’o ‘that’s all’); 4) the list of PMs, used primarily in dialogues, was made (among such PMs are, for example, “xeno”-markers takoj ‘like’, grit ‘says’ and meta-communicative markers like vidish’ ‘you know’, (ja) ne znaju ‘don’t know’). Particular attention was paid to the variability of pragmatic markers, as well as to complex cases of their identification. Finally, the most common models of pragmatic markers formation (for single-word and multi-word PMs) were revealed.

Inter-textual cultural competence has long been considered to be of utmost importance to interpreters and translators. Within the post-structuralist framework, every text contains references, implicit or explicit, to other texts. These references are known as inter-textual elements or vertical context elements. The accuracy of translation/interpretation rests entirely on the interpreter’s / translator’s ability to identify the inter-textual element and its function. Thus, a study of intertextuality is of high practical value. The present paper looks into the sources and functions of inter-textual elements found in contemporary English-language political media discourse. The analysis is based on full-text versions of the Economist issues (2017-2018). The infra-context studies and the vertical context theory serve as the theoretical foundations of the research. Methodologically, the paper is a result of critical discourse and content analysis. The results of the research demonstrate that as much as 40-50% of headlines, leads, and captions in a given issue of The Economist are inter-textual. The common sources of intertextuality, our analysis shows, are the Bible, Shakespeare, the US Declaration of Independence, the UN Charter, cultural stereotypes, movies, popular songs, advertisement, and commercial slogans. In conclusion, it can be said that the research has demonstrated a high degree of intertextuality of English-language political media discourse, which allows us to claim that intertextuality defines it as a genre.

The paper presents a comparative analysis of two massive open online Academic Writing courses offered by Russian universities. Over the past decade, academic writing, in Russian as well as English, has become one of the top learning priorities in Russian universities. In 2012, the Russian government launched the so-called ‘Project 5-100’. The Project aims to bring a minimum of five Russian universities into at least one of the three most authoritative world university rankings. The goal is to be reached by fostering innovation, attracting international students and, more importantly, by increasing the research potential and boosting the employees’ science citation index in international databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science. Although the Project currently unites only twenty one universities in Russia (the overall number of tertiary education institutions in the country is 965), it has had an impact on the Russian tertiary education landscape on the whole, specifically, on teaching English. From now on, research papers were to be published in English rather than in Russian, to be accessible for the international academic community. Thus, responding to the need to promote Russian universities and boost their global recognition through an increase in citations, universities have incorporated academic writing classes into their curricula. Over the past decade, academic writing has come to dominate the English language teaching landscape in Russian universities. Despite the rise in the number academic writing courses offered by Russian universities that the country has witnessed over the recent years, the curricula developers have run into a number of problems. One of the biggest challenges proved to be an immense cultural barrier and a clash of the Russian native academic writing tradition and the need to adopt the Anglo-Saxon tradition imposed by the international research universities. This paper examines the cultural differences in the two traditions through content analysis of two Academic Writing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) currently offered by Russian universities. The first course, Russian Academic Writing, is run by St Petersburg State University through Open Education, a Russian national MOOC platform. The course, which is delivered in Russian, targets Russian-speaking scientists and scholars and promotes the traditional Russian approach to academic writing. The second course, English for Research Publication Purposes, is offered in English by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology on Coursera, and targets an international audience and is construed as an ‘international’ course. By conducting a comparative content analysis of the two courses this paper aims at bringing the gap between the Russian and the international (Anglo-Saxon in origin) traditions of academic writing and scholarly publishing.

Pragmatic markers (PMs) are discourse units (words and multiword expressions) with a weakened referential meaning, which perform a variety of pragmatic tasks. For example, in English the common PMs are “well”, “you know”, “I think”, and many others. PMs are integral elements of spoken discourse in every language. According to the results obtained from the ORD corpus of everyday Russian, their share can reach up to 6% of the total number of words in speech of individual speakers. More than that, in some speech fragments, PMs may even exceed the share of significant units (i.e., standard words). However, despite their frequency and usualness, PMs are still poorly understood. Current NLP and discourse modeling systems lack information on PMs distribution and usage, this fact leads to noticeable shortcomings in work of these systems when they face spontaneous speech of everyday spoken discourse. In this paper we present top frequency lists of PMs for Russian dialogue and monologue spoken speech in general, and also for separate sociological groups of informants (by gender and by age). Our current list of PMs for Russian contains 450 units which are the variants of 50 main structural types. Besides, we consider the most frequent functions of PMs in spoken Russian. The presented quantitative data may be used for improvement of NPL and discourse modeling systems.

The past decade has seen a powerful trend in Russian tertiary education towards soft skills development among university students, favouring them over hard skills. The traditional Russian higher education model is characterised by focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on hard skills. However, with the pressing need to internationalise Russian universities so that they fit into the global education and research landscape, there emerged a need for a shift. An immediate response to the challenge consisted in ‘‘importing’’ British and American curricula to introduce classes of Academic Writing and, later, Academic Public Speaking in Russian universities. However, the attempts to blindly transplant a foreign rhetorical tradition have proved to be misguided. Although both the Anglo-Saxon and Russian academic rhetorics are rooted in the Greek culture, their evolution over the centuries resulted in two separate and non-identical rhetorical traditions. The differences are particularly striking when a student, an instructor or a researcher who was raised in a Russian academic environment is taught or forced to adopt Anglo-Saxon conventions. The resulting tension can be most efficiently addressed by an adjustment of the existing ‘‘domestic’’ conventions and creation of a customised rather than one-size-fits-all curriculum. To be able to take into account the ‘‘domestic’’ conventions, there has to be an inventory of them. The present paper reflects research conducted within the framework of contrastive rhetoric, as proposed by R. Kaplan in his seminal ‘‘doodle paper’’ (Kaplan 1966) which threw into spotlight a need to identify national patterns and build on them when teaching academic writing in English to international students. We start on the premise that before tackling the language issues, the course should address rhetorical strategies and argumentation patterns, as errors in these areas often prove to be a bigger barrier to understanding than purely linguistic mistakes. We analyse a sampling of English-language argumentative essays written by an advanced English class of Russian L1 speakers before they received any instruction in academic writing. We then identify the emergent rhetorical patterns and argumentation chosen by the students. We hypothesise that students will transfer the accepted Russian argumentation patterns and rhetorical strategies into their English language essay.

Russian Abstract: Обложка журнала рассматривается как образец мультимодального текста. Дается теоретический обзор научной литературы, посвященной изучению мультимодальности в рамках лингвистики. Приводятся определения понятия «мультимодальность». Уточняется терминология, сопоставляется употребление в современном языкознании терминов мультимодальный, поликодовый, креолизированный текст. Особое внимание уделяется особенностям журнальной обложки как само- стоятельного жанра. Рассмотрены классификации типов обложек в зависимости от соотношения вербального и графического компонента. Выполнен краткий обзор подходов к изучению мультимодального текста. Обосновывается целесообразность применения к анализу материала системно-функционального и социокогнитивного подходов. Представлены результаты сопоставительного анализа журнальных обложек. Журнальная обложка рассматривается как мультимодальный текст — комплекс вербальной и визуальной составляющей. При этом вербальная составляющая может быть представлена как эксплицитно, так и имплицитно, то есть компрессированно. Показано, что механизм интерпретации смысловой нагрузки обложки может считываться реципиентом двумя способами: либо на основе комбинации вербальной и визуальной информации, либо за счет актуализациии компрессированного вербального компонента с помощью визуальной составляющей. Новизна исследования видится в демонстрации, что изображение с подразумеваемым (компрессированным) вербальным компонентом может представлять собой мультимодальный текст. English Abstract: A cover of a journal is considered as a sample of multimodal text. A theoretical review of the scientific literature devoted to the study of multimodality in the framework of linguistics is given. Definitions of the concept of “multimodality” are given. The article clarifies the terminology, compares the usage of the terms multimodal, polycode, creolized text in modern linguistics. Special attention is paid to the peculiarities of a magazine cover as an independent genre. Classifications of cover types depending on the ratio of verbal and graphic components are considered. A brief review of approaches to the study of multimodal text is made. The expediency of applying system-functional and sociocognitive approaches to the analysis of the material is substantiated. The results of comparative analysis of magazine covers are presented. A magazine cover is considered as a multimodal text, i.e. a complex of verbal and visual components. In this case, the verbal component can be represented both explicitly and implicitly, that is, compressed. It is shown that the mechanism of interpretation of the semantic load of a cover can be read by recipient in two ways: either on the basis of a combination of verbal and visual information, or due to the actualization of compressed verbal component with the help of the visual component. The novelty of the study is seen in the demonstration that an image with an implied (compressed) verbal component can be a multimodal text.

Russian Abstract: Статья посвящена медиатизации возможной независимости Шотландии в социальных сетях. Проводится мультимодальный анализ тематических интернет-мемов 2014-2016 гг. как образцов сетевого политического дискурса. Сетевой политический дискурс охарактеризован как объект лингвистического и мультимодального анализа. Этот вид дискурса рассматривается как неинституциональная разновидность политического дискурса вообще, отличающаяся неофициальностью, стихийностью, высокой скоростью реагирования на общественные вызовы и многоголосием. Отмечается способность сетевого политического дискурса к компрессии информации и оценочной интерпретации отражаемой действительности. Рассматривается понятие интердискурсивности как одной из жанрообразующих черт сетевого политического дискурса в целом и интернет-мемов в частности. Приводится определение мультимодального текста как задействующего вербальный и зрительный каналы восприятия, оба из которых содержат ключевые элементы информации для декодирования смысла. Рассматриваются различные определения интернет-мема как мультимодального жанра интернет-коммуникации. Выполнен анализ четырех интернет-мемов о независимости Шотландии. Мемы анализируются на предмет соотношения вербального и визуального компонента; стилистических характеристик текстовой составляющей; сильной и слабой позиции визуальной составляющей; источников прецедентности и интердискурсивного характера отношений между составляющими. English Abstract: The article is dedicated to the mediation of the possible independence of Scotland in social networks. A multimodal analysis of thematic Internet memes 2014—2016 is carried out as examples of online political discourse. Online political discourse is characterized as an object of linguistic and multimodal analysis. This type of discourse is considered as an uninstitutional kind of political discourse in general, characterized by informality, spontaneity, high speed of response to public challenges and polyphony. The ability of network political discourse to compress information and the estimated interpretation of reflected reality is noted. The concept of interdiscursiveness is considered as one of the genre-forming features of network political discourse in general and Internet memes in particular. The definition of multimodal text as involving the verbal and visual channels of perception, both of which contain key elements of information for decoding the meaning, is given. Various definitions of the Internet meme as a multimodal genre of Internet communication are considered. The analysis of four Internet memes about the independence of Scotland is given. Memes are analyzed for the relationship of verbal and visual component; stylistic characteristics of the text component; strong and weak position of the visual component; sources of precedent and interdiscursive nature of relations between components.

The paper discusses plural forms of Russian nouns (in particular, of the surnames) like vsjakie tam Ivanovy (‘various Ivanovs’, ‘all sorts of Ivanovs’), expressing negative opinion about the referents. The co-occurrence patterns of the Pl.Pej forms by Web-corpus data is revealed. Pl.Pej forms foremost fit together with universal quantifiers including ‘all’, ‘all of these’ etc., and can be easily integrate in quantificational expressions, e.g., combinations with numerals, collective nouns, and expressions that include number words like mnogo (‘many’). These elements are able to convey and support the meaning of multiplicity, non-uniqueness of the objects, denoted by forms of Pl.Pej.