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Филология: вечная и молодая. Сборник статей к юбилею профессора М.Л.Ремневой
«Bankruptcy» Concept Within the Legal Linguistics Coordinates: Russian–English–French Approximations
The article addresses the notion of bankruptcy as perceived by speakers of current Russian, English and French languages both lawyers and participants in professional communication from other trades. Semantic structure of the term is identified based on its lexicographic and regulatory definitions.
In many languages of the world, the forms in the irrealis domain (subjunctive, conjunctive, conditional) are also used in complement clauses. The set of verbs that require subjunctive complementation is similar but not identical across languages. The paper identifies Russian verbs licensing subjunctive in complement clauses, either as the only option or as an alternative to the indicative. Basing on the Russian National Corpus, a list of these predicates is compiled, with relative frequencies of subjunctive vs. indicative for each predicate. The main result of the study is distinguishing two types of subjunctive complement clauses. Most predicates belong to the group which is similar to purpose clauses with чтобы, both semantically and syntactically. The subject of the main predicate is involved in the situation described by the subordinate clause by wishing it to be realized, by intention, or causal relations. The second, minor group includes epistemic uses of чтобы with e.g. сомневаться and other predicates in the context of negation, interrogation and other constructions expressing low probability.
The paper discusses sociolinguistic implementations of statistical analysis of the spoken subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Given the considerable size of the corpus (about 10 mln tokens), an analysis of co-variation of various linguistic parameters with one of the few sociolinguistic parameters available – the speaker’s gender – may give rich and interesting results. One specific example of co-variation is considered in detail: the mean length of the utterance (in tokens). Comparing this parameter in public communication shows statistically significant difference between the speech of men and women (men talk more), while the same difference is absent in private communication. Another important parameter is the gender of the addressee. Again, co-variation is quite different in public and private discourse. In private communication, the utterances are longer when addressing someone of the same sex, the difference between men and women is not statistically significant. In public communication, the utterances are longer when addressing a woman, whether the speaker herself is a man or woman. These conclusions are consistent with the results of sociolinguistic gender studies obtained elsewhere and by other methods. Linguistic difference between men and women are not absolute but depend on the communicative situation (public vs. private). Public discourse is a playground for linguistic competition in which men are the winning party. In private discourse, competition dissolves.
The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single- vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.
This article describes the expierence of studying factors influencing the social well-being of educational migrants as mesured by means of a psychological well-being scale (A. Perrudet-Badoux, G.A. Mendelsohn, J.Chiche, 1988) previously adapted for Russian by M.V. Sokolova. A statistical analysis of the scale's reliability is performed. Trends in dynamics of subjective well-being are indentified on the basis the correlations analysis between the condbtbions of adaptation and its success rate, and potential mechanisms for developing subjective well-being among student migrants living in student hostels are described. Particular attention is paid to commuting as a factor of adaptation.