Purpose. Linguistically, Late Byzantine church canonical erotapokriseis are a type of text influenced by the spoken language. However, their material is not actually presented in existing studies of the grammar and vocabulary of the Byzantine Greek. The article is devoted to the consideration of word formation and semantics of Greek lexemes with the suffix -(ι)τζ-.

Results. The source for this study was the erotapokriseis of Peter the Chartophylax (late 11^th century). Revisions of the text contain various syntactic features. However, of greater interest to us are the lexemes κορίτζα and παπαδίτζης found in the text under consideration, from the point of view of their word-formation model. The article deals with the language features of the text in general, as well as word-formation features and semantic properties of the lexemes in particular. A full-corpus search for κορίτζ- and παπαδίτζ- in the TLG database showed that the first of them occurs 51 times in total (with more than half of the cases in variation with the stem κορίτζι-). Its earliest appearance is recorded in the anonymous Vitae Sanctae Mariae (6^th century). Turning to the question of the semantics of the lexeme παπαδίτζης which differs from that presented in historical dictionaries, the author of the article clarifies the contextual meaning of this word. The expansion of the semantic field of this lexeme probably occurred under the influence of the nature of the texts of this genre (church canonical epistolography). The article also analyzes the hypotheses of the origin of the formant -(ί)τζ-.

Conclusion. The author comes to the conclusion about possible indigenous Greek or Slavic origin of the formant.

Purpose. By using a corpus of 120 Russian scientific articles on humanities the study analyzed linguistic actualizers of hedging as a metadiscourse strategy contributing to the efficient communication between an author and a reader. The novelty of the study is determined by scarcity of metadiscourse studies on articles in Russian, while it is relevant due to the ongoing attempts to re-interpret the nature of academic discourse, which has been considered as an interactional rather than informational space. This approach determines the need to study linguistic tools that help to construct an efficient dialogue with the reader and present research results in a way that is appropriate in the scientific community. The study aims to reveal lexical and lexico-syntactic hedges and determine their frequencies and functions in the corpus of scientific articles on humanities.

Results. It was demonstrated that hedging is an integral part of academic discourse, where it mitigates the categoricalness of author’s claims by de-intensifying features under consideration, shifting the communicative focus to the emotional state or subjective nature of author’s opinions, indicating the non-absolute nature of his statements, or presenting the statements as possible ones.

Conclusion. The analysis revealed hedging to be a crucial component of effective author-reader interaction, mitigating categorical statements and conveying a nuanced understanding of the research issue. Adverbs and verbs were the most prevalent lexical hedges, while introductory constructions played a significant role in the lexico-syntactic category. These findings emphasize the importance of hedging in creating a collaborative academic discourse space.

Purpose. The article presents the results of a structural-semantic analysis of person nominations functioning in Internet discourse. Based on speech and lexicographic sources, the composition of the card index was determined – 145 slang personal nouns. The analysis of speech material was carried out within the framework of the derivational paradigm, which involves the complex use of several methods – morphemic, morphonological, word-formational and semantic.

Results. The analysis of lexical material allowed to establish the main ways of replenishing the lexicon of person nominations. Thus, 35.8 % of units are borrowings, and 64.2 % are Russian derivatives. Almost all borrowings in the card index (50 out of 52 lexemes) are Anglicisms; cases of borrowing from the Japanese language are unique. A third of the units in in the card index (44 words) are neolexemes that is, new phonetic units with new semantics The formation of person nominations on the basis of the Russian language occurs through semantic derivation, affixation, compounding, fusion, and phonetic truncation.

Conclusion. Suffixation turns out to be the most productive way of producing personal nouns (the share of suffixal derivatives is 66 %, 13 different formants form neologisms with the meaning ‘person’ have been identified). The other methods of word formation listed earlier are less relevant in Internet discourse.

Purpose. The article examines the usage peculiarities of the universal precedent anthroponym “Napoleon” by the Russian mass media in the process of modeling media images of two modern European politicians – the French President Emmanuel Macron and the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

Results. A corpus of the Russian media texts including more than 500 contexts serve as the material for the analysis. The texts were scrutinised with the help of lexical-semantic, distributional and frame methods to identify and describe the differential features of the precedent anthroponym “Napoleon”. These features coming from three frames (“Anthropometric and Physiological Characteristics”, “Personal Characteristics” and “Social Characteristics”) are regularly used by the Russian mass media to characterize European politicians.

Conclusion. It is established that the most popular stereotypical ideas about Napoleon used in the Russian mass media while constructing media images of E. Macron and V. Zelensky are associated with Napoleon’s short stature, young age of coming to power, exorbitant political ambitions, aggression towards Russia and defeat at Waterloo. It is demonstrated that numerous appeals to the image of the French emperor allow the mass media not only to focus attention on the most striking personal and professional traits of European leaders who are ideological opponents of Russia, but also to predict the sad demise of their political career in case of further confrontation with Russia and the implementation of ill-considered political projects.

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to present one of the main means of expressing the category of certainty-indeterminacy, or rather the opposition of the forms of the genitive and accusative cases, its semantics and ways of expressing them in Persian. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that Iranian students make persistent mistakes in Russian due to failure to distinguish between the forms of accusative and genitive cases of definiteness and uncertainty, due to the lack of a case system in the Persian language.

Results. The research material consists of examples selected by the authors from various types of scientific works and Russian language textbooks for foreign students. In addition, the research material included examples from the personal files of the authors’ mistakes, collected during monitoring of the educational process and the transfer process of Russian studies students at universities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The study is based on such research methods as qualitative analysis, continuous sampling method and comparative method.

Conclusion. It was revealed that the opposition of the forms of the accusative and genitive cases, as the main factor in the spread of errors in the use of RFL by Iranian students both in the learning process and in the translation process, is transmitted in Persian by lexical and grammatical means. As a result, a classification of shades of opposition of the accusative and genitive forms of the categories of definiteness and uncertainty and their correlates in the Persian language was proposed.

Purpose. The article deals with the pragmatic analysis of verbal and visual means of representation of objects and phenomena found in children's popular science books in Russian and French.

Results. Depending on the function performed, all the means were divided into 5 categories: verbal nominative, verbal expressive, verbal figurative, visual figurative and visual non-figurative. The authors of the books use various types of means to simplify the perception of the material by children. Verbal nominative and verbal expressive means are more typical for the French encyclopedia, verbal figurative ones – for the Russian book.

Conclusion. Visual figurative means were found only in the Russian book. Consequently, the linguocultural specificity of the representation of objects and phenomena in the analyzed books is revealed. The French encyclopedia is focused on unadapted representation of scientific facts and the frequent use of verbal nominative and expressive means; it contains a small number of verbal figurative means and no visual figurative means, whereas the author of the Russian book strives for greater «artistry» of the text and creates a fabulous atmosphere through the introduction of permanent heroes of a series of encyclopedias and extensive use of verbal and visual figurative means.

Purpose. The study provides a linguocultural and cognitive analysis of the main metaphors representing the images of police and protesters in the Hong Kong protest context at the verbal level of text. The research is based on 305 comments on video clips on the BiliBili platform over the period from 2019 to 2020 selected by the method of continuous sampling. The authors use the cognitive-discursive method, which relies on discoveries in the field of metaphorical modelling and achievements in the field of discourse analysis. The obtained results may be of practical importance for researchers in the field of metaphorology, cognitive linguistics, and political linguistics.

Results. Despite the scarcity of explicit metaphors for the police, the conducted frame analysis has revealed 4 frames: actions of the police, attitudes towards the police, functions of the police, and interaction with the police. As for the protesters, 3 metaphorical models have been determined: PROTESTERS – ANIMATE WORLD, PROTESTERS – INANIMATE WORLD, PROTESTERS – SICKNESS.

Conclusion. The authors note that almost all of the metaphorical expressions tend to unanimously represent positive attitudes towards the police. However, metaphors regarding the protesters are absolutely different and are characterized by a multitude of negative metaphorical uses. In addition, the authors determine the dominant and the most frequent metaphorical models, and suggest possible causes of the entirely positive perception of the police during the period of social unrest.

Purpose. The article examines the problem of formation of V. A. Zhukovsky’s literary reputation in 1808–1815, based on the materials of the journals Vestnik Evropy and Rossiiskii Muzeum.

Results. Having started editing Vestnik Evropy in 1808, Zhukovsky announced the idyllic self-representational model of the “petit cercle” (“small circle”) which he had previously built in his lyrics, correspondence and diaries. This model was ignored by M.T. Kachenovsky, Zhukovsky’s comrade in publishing the magazine, guided by the raznochintsy model of “writer-worker”. V.V. Izmailov (the editor of Vestnik Evropy in 1814) in 1815 created a magazine called Russian Museum, where V.A. Zhukovsky’s autorepresentative model was adapted to the Karamzin context and transformed. The “small circle” of souls turned into a circle of selected talents, and the hostile force of fate – into the envy of their literary opponents. The most fruitful for the Karamzinist reception was Zhukovsky’s role of “Russian Tyrtaeus”.

Conclusion. Thus, the ensemble unity of the journals Vestnik Evropy and Rossiiski Muzeum may be considered as a space where Zhukovsky’s literary reputation was formed in a complex interaction of interpretations.

Purpose. The article examines the processes of formation of spatial representations in the writer’s mind and ways of their representation in artistic creativity using the example of the biography of V.I. Dahl and his cycle of short stories, essays and fairy tales Scenes from Russian Everyday Life. The author uses the method of “imaginative geography” which is a combination of cognitive geography, psychology, linguistics, and literary studies methods.

Results. One of the most important tasks of the research is to understand the specifics of modeling space in the writer’s mind, his original ways of creating geographical images, interpreting spatial representations in the context of literary (genre, style) discourse. Due to life circumstances, Dahl often moved, changed his place of residence and service, which influenced the structure of spatial thinking and modeling of the original spatial myth. Since the writer’s figurative geographical representations directly nourished his work and became an important element of the compositional and narrative structure of texts, the cognitive geographical context is most clearly seen in collections of his stories written on the basis of direct observations and practice of life, in particular, such as Scenes from Russian Everyday Life. This is especially true for the plots and stories based on Dahl’s trips to the Ural-Caspian region, Orenburg and the trans-Ural steppes.

Conclusion. As the genre-cognitive analysis of the cycle and, in particular, the story Shard of Ice shows spatial impressions were most often represented in genre form of a fable, and were interpreted by the writer in mythological, historical, socio-psychological and ethological aspects.

Purpose. The work examines the cycle-creating poetics of Tolstoy’s The First Russian Book for Reading and in particular – the story “How auntie told her grandmother about how the bandit Yemelka Pugachev gave her a dime” (1875) which occupies an essential place and, as demonstrated in the article, may be regarded as one of the key poles in the artistic structure of this collection of prose works.

Results. The article compares three editions of the story on Pugachev, establishes their continuity in relation to The Captain’s Daughter and The Squire's Daughter by A.S. Pushkin, analyzes the changes in Pugachev’s image and the entire narrative strategy of representing the impostor. The main images and motifs that form the meaning for the story on Yemelyan Pugachev are presented in the book as a system of repetitions and juxtapositions: conformity / non-conformity to one's place, imposture/self-denial, etc. They are gradually included in the book and develop into stories about animals and people. Thus, in order to understand Tolstoy’s view of Pugachev the necessary explanatory context was reconstructed, and within this context the hero’s semantic and functions were clarified. It is concluded that multiple “linkages” of this selected story with other stories within a framework of “The First Russian Book for Reading” allowed the reader to see the national ideal (Ermak) and its antipode (Pugachev) correlated with each other.

Conclusion. The methodological basis of this paper is provided by works of W. Schmid on narrative equivalence, V.B. Shklovsky, S.G. Bocharov, V.G. Odinokov and Yu.V. Lebedev on Tolstoy’s techniques of “estrangement” and “linkages”, as well as B.A. Uspensky’s and A.M. Panchenko’s observations on Russian imposture.

Purpose. The article examines the previously unexplored mechanism of the systemic restructuring of Ivan A. Bunin’s poetics at the beginning of the 20^th century. It is studied at different levels: images interaction, plots structure, subjects of narration. The last one seems to be the most important for understanding Bunin’s quick transition from the narodnichestvo and Tolstoyism ideas (prevailing in his work of the 1890s) to the philosophy close to the early symbolists (determining the poetics of the stories of 1900-1902).

Results. The gradual reduction of traditional ideological motifs associated with narodnichestvo and Tolstoyism – while Tolstoy’s ideologemes remained in the Bunin’s stories longer than narodnik ones – made room for landscape sketches not tied to socially significant subjects, and the narrator’s free reflections on beauty of the world and the incomprehensibility of God’s plan. At the formal level, this manifests in unusual compositional solutions and a new understanding of characters structure. The mechanisms of general change in poetics are shown: from characters to plots, from plots to new ways of formatting ideas within the narrative.

Conclusion. Along with demonstrating the dynamics of Bunin’s creativity and the gradual restructuring of poetics, a number of conclusions have been made that characterize the specifics of Bunin’s “modernity” against the background of early symbolism.

Purpose. The article examines the mice/mousetrap motif which is “peripheral” (B. Gasparov) in V. Nabokov’s novel Despair, but it is associated with the central motives of crime and punishment, self-identification, and relationships with a double.

Results. It is proved that the double-antagonists of the central character of the novel are allusively associated with the images of a cat / lion, and in Herman’s appearance and behavior associations with the image of a mouse can be traced. A significant piece of clothing is the “mouse leggings” that Herman takes off and puts on Felix before killing him. An attempt to replace or borrow the name of his double-antagonists counterparts testifies to Herman’s internal insecurity and dissatisfaction with himself.

The image of a mouse contains an allusion to Notes from Underground by F.M. Dostoevsky, and the final motif of the mouse, the image of a mousetrap, refers to the famous Hamlet scene. However, it is given in a transformed form in the novel: Herman appears as both a director, an actor, and a viewer, but does not feel remorse, does not sense a “trap”. Self-exposure occurs when Herman takes the position of the reader of his text.

Conclusion. The text created by the character becomes a «mousetrap», and in the absence of eyewitnesses, it testifies against the author, who turned out to be mediocrity and a criminal, revealing the failure of Herman’s plan to get rid of the “mouse” in himself and take the position of the “master” of his existence.

Purpose. The article analyzes the story Nikita, which is important for the work of A. Platonov. It was originally named The Kind Whale and was included into the cycle Good People.

Results. The authors identify the mythological picture of the world implementation features in the story. It is noted that the writer represents the reality through a perception of a five-year-old boy who gives animation, reason and feelings to visible objects around him, which are perceived by the hero through kinship terms, proper nouns, and other linguistic units mastered by this age. In Nikita's mythological picture of the world there are “his own” things, which are associated with the image of a house and a yard, fenced off from the “stranger” things. Being appointed daily to the role of master by his mother, Nikita must preserve the harmony of his world – to live quietly, that is, in kinship with “his” world, not allowing anyone else and not depriving of life named, and therefore animate, inhabitants. Violation of the maternal covenant has negative consequences: “one’s own” and “someone else’s” change places, instilling fear in Nikita, which he had not experienced before, because he lived in the world of objects and phenomena created and named by him, and therefore, endowed with life.

Conclusion. The opposition “life – death” acquires an additional meaning from A. Platonov, including the opposition “kinship – orphanhood”: the one who is related to the world remains alive, and orphanhood is perceived as detachment from the world, loss of connection with it, which is equal to death.