Linguists have long classified languages according to the ways in which their intransitive subjects, transitive subjects, and direct objects align with respect to case marking and/or agreement. The two main divisions are known as the (nominative–)accusative and ergative(–absolutive) alignments.  Under an accusative alignment pattern, the intransitive subject (abbreviated here as S) and the transitive subject (A: for agent, or agent-like argument) are encoded the same way (nominative), while the transitive direct object (O) is encoded separately (accusative). Under an ergative alignment pattern, on the other hand, S and O have identical encoding (absolutive) while A has its own separate case (ergative); see Comrie (1978); Dixon (1979; 1994); Manning (1996); Aldridge (2008); McGregor (2009); among others. These alignments can be expressed not only through case marking but also through agreement; S and A may determine the same agreement, in contrast to O, or S and O may license the same agreement, in contrast to A.

The book comprises study materials for learning English. It aims at developing students' communication skills which are necessary for using English in every day life and professional activities. The book provides learners with extra opportunities for developing their listening, pronunciation, vocabulary and speaking skills through the use of authentic video content selected in accordance with the requirements of the ESL course.

My book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically – the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This work examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint.

The resource book is a collection of twelve lessons based on a selection of TED talks about different aspects of modern life. The selected TED talks not only enhance the learners’ English language proficiency but also develop the learners’ professional competencies and expand their outlook.  All the lessons have a regular structure and include exercises for developing vocabulary, listening, reading, speaking, note-taking and writing skills. A quick test has been developed for each lesson checking the student’s assimilation of the material.  Through authentic models of effective communication, students build fluency to achieve academic and personal success. The resource book can be used both for classroom activities and for independent work. 

The book is devoted to qualifying parts of speech: adjective and adverb.

The book is devoted to linguistic problems of professional information exchange among specialists of various fields. 

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, AINL 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in October 2018. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions and cover a wide range of topics, including morphology and word-level semantics, sentence and discourse representations, corpus linguistics, language resources, and social interaction analysis. 

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

Scandinavian motifs, both religious and related to arts and crafts, are typically deprived of their religious content in the process of Christianization as percieved in Old Rus' literature in which myths are treated as faded histories or legends.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

This edited collection presents a range of methods that can be used to analyse linguistic data quantitatively. A series of case studies of Russian data spanning different aspects of modern linguistics serve as the basis for a discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in linguistic data analysis. The book presents current trends in quantitative linguistics, evaluates methods and presents the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapters contain introductions to the methods and relevant references for further reading.

The Russian language, despite being one of the most studied in the world, until recently has been little explored quantitatively. After a burst of research activity in the years 1960-1980, quantitative studies of Russian vanished. They are now reappearing in an entirely different context. Today we have large and deeply annotated corpora available for extended quantitative research, such as the Russian National Corpus, ruWac, RuTenTen, to name just a few (websites for these and other resources will be found in a special section in the References). The present volume is intended to fill the lacuna between the available data and the methods that can be applied to studying them.

Our goal is to present current trends in researching Russian quantitative linguistics, to evaluate the research methods vis-à-vis Russian data, and to show both the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods. We especially encouraged our authors to focus on evaluating statistical methods and new models of analysis. New findings concern applicability, evaluation, and the challenges that arise from using quantitative approaches to Russian data.

This book explores how artistic strategies of resistance have survived under the conservative-authoritarian regime which has been in place in Russia since 2012. It discusses the conditions under which artists work as the state spells out a new state cultural policy, aesthetics change and the state attempts to define what constitutes good taste. It examines the approaches artists are adopting to resist state oppression and to question the present system and attitudes to art. The book addresses a wide range of issues related to these themes, considers the work of individual artists and includes besides its focus on the visual arts also some discussion of contemporary theatre. The book is interdisciplinary: its authors include artists, art historians, theatre critics, historians, linguists, sociologists and political scientists from Russia, Europe and the United States.

This book aims at developing reserahc writing skills of students. The two key genres of an empirical research paper and a research proposal are used as a basis to develop researcg communication skills. 

The book is intended primarily for the first year undergraduate students but can be also recommended for students of other levels and adults who would like to improve their pronunciation and review the basics of the English grammar. Its main objective is complex revision and development of the student’s knowledge of English phonetics and morphology (group of nominal parts of speech) in order to advance both receptive (listening, reading) and productive (speaking, writing) skills. The Level of English before starting the course is supposed to be not lower than A2-B1 according to the CEFR.

The book contains seven chapters, each devoted to a separate topic, and can be logically divided into two main parts: phonetics (Chapter I) and morphology (Chapters II – VII). All chapters include theoretical part and exercises that are aimed at both recognizing the studied linguistic phenomenon (on its own and within short contexts) and using it. The exercises comprise such tasks as matching words with their definitions, multiple choice, completing sentences with appropriate words, matching parts of sentences, translating, analyzing sentences and texts, creating one’s own texts. The chapters of the book can be studied in any order.

The presentation of linguistic theory is based on the classic and recent books by Russian and foreign scholars. The priority was given to Russian books as taking into consideration the background and typical problems of Russian learners of the English language. The illustrative examples and material for exercises comes from a variety of sources (fiction, encyclopedic and media resources, academic journals, monolingual English dictionaries) in order to demonstrate how the studied linguistic units function in different contexts and text genres.

This training manual is addressed to students of higher education institutions, whose level of English is B2 – C1 according to CEFR and whose course of studies requires writing and defending Research Project Proposal in English. The book is aimed at building and development of Academic skills in oral speech considered necessary for the defense of the Project Proposal of Graduate Qualification Work. Specific feature of the manual is considering new forms of communication, namely giving presentation speech in English. The texts and tasks of the manual envisages forming the skills of designing and performing academic  presentations on professinal topics as well as developing  soft skills, which are recognised as a significant constituent of  graduates' professional competency. The training guide contains exercises for both  inclass  and out-of- class work, including the use of the Internet.

The study is a quantitative analysis of the use of syntactic markers of academic discourse in two kinds of corpora: expert corpora which comprise articles published in peer-reviewed journals in management and economics and learner corpora of students’ research papers in the same disciplines. The syntactic constructions selected for the analysis are taken from various guidebooks and textbooks in academic writing. They are it-clefts; pseudo-clefts; th-wh constructions; attitudinal clauses; various types of adverbial clauses; relative clauses and non-finite clauses. The paper aims at identifying the differences between student and professional writing as well as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines in order to facilitate EAP teachers to design their courses in academic writing in the conditions of limited classroom time making them more discipline specific and relevant to learners’ needs.

Was there a distinct and coherent Soviet-bloc literature? We know it was because it is no more. This paper proposes to explore it through the transnational literary field within which it circulated, a regional rival to Pascale Casanova's more famous World Republic of Letters. After identifying the borders, structures, and principles of operation that Soviet cultural bureaucracies designed for this People's Republic of Letters in the late-Stalin period, we will examine how deftly post-Stalin-era writers and readers navigated it in the decades that followed. In particular, the sheer unevenness of censorship practices across Eastern Europe allowed Soviet readers to access material that for political, or puritanical, or genre reasons was not available in Soviet literature. Such a revisionist approach to transnational print culture not only explains some of the very unusual Soviet-bloc bestsellers among Russian audiences but also highlights the sheer agency of those audiences.

Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are ‘segment-sized’ (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of complex word forms and sentences. In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.

The current research is devoted to the comparative and contrastive analysis of Donald Trump’s victory and inaugural speeches. Its objective is to identify their similarities and differences from the functional and linguistic points of view. The research consists of several stages. First, the two genres of discourse in question are defined. Then, an overview of their functions is provided. Next, the linguistic means of performing them are analyzed. The results of the research indicate that, due to their main goals, the genres in question express certain functions, which can be verbally expressed in various ways: in Trump’s victory speech the inspirative function comes to the fore, while in his inaugural address the integrative and the performative functions dominate the other ones. Furthermore, in each case linguistic peculiarities correlate with the functions: in the victory speech the focus is on the 'greatness' of everything and everyone, whereas in the inaugural speech words connected with patriotism prevail, which is expressed mostly by means of personal pronouns. The results of the current research may function as a basis for further analysis of the genre of the victory speech as it has not received enough scholarly attention yet and of the peculiarities of Donald Trump’s political discourse. 

Since the late 1980s, we witnessed vigorous attempts to bury the Soviet intelligentsia along with Soviet literature. Some efforts along these lines were truly inspired (Anninsky, 1992Anninsky, L. (1992). The suppression of the intelligentsia. Will it persist till 2000? [Vytesnenia intelligentsia. Will it persists till 2000?]. Ogonek, № 29-30, pp. 28–29. [Google Scholar]; Yampolsky, 1991Yampolsky, M. (1991). Rape by confession [Iznasilovanny pokaianiem]. Literaturnoe obozrenie, 8, 89–96. [Google Scholar]). And yet, forecasts about the imminent demise of Russian intelligentsia have proved premature. Plenty of people still identify themselves with this vaunted group. Some go out of their way to sell their services to the official authorities, to Vladimir Putin – the surprising monarch that emerged after breakup of the Soviet Union. Others, still in self-criticism mode, agitate against the reigning powers and official establishment or sport a decidedly apolitical attitude. Then there are those who enjoy a cozy relationship with the establishment and milk it to their advantage.

Structurally, the situation uncannily resembles the one that prevailed in the Soviet era. The notion that the intelligenty will transform themselves into pragmatic intellectuals – a common assumption in the 1990s – didn’t pan out (Kordonsky, 1994Kordonsky, S. (1994). Intelligentsia as a national elite[Intelligentsia v roli nationalnoi elity]. Predely vlasti, 1, 134–152). The intelligentsia is still very much with us, even though it has adapted to the circumstances.

We utilized the event-related potential (ERP) technique to study neural activity associated with different levels of working memory (WM) load during simultaneous interpretation (SI) of continuous prose. The amplitude of N1 and P1 components elicited by task-irrelevant tone probes was significantly modulated as a function of WM load but not the direction of interpretation. Furthermore, the latency of the P1 increased significantly with WM load. The WM load effect on N1 latency, however, did not reach significance. Larger negativity under lower WM loads suggests that more attention is available to process the source message, providing the first electrophysiological evidence in support of the Efforts Model of SI. Relationships between the direction of interpretation and median WM load are also discussed.

This paper describes the range of patterns used for the expression of ‘other’ in East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages, an indigenous language family of the Eastern Caucasus mainly spoken in the Republics of Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia (Russian Federation), as well as in northern regions of Azerbaijan and eastern parts of Georgia.

This paper reports the results of the study of the Maltese language and the extent of Arabic influence on the Maltese Language. The factors underlying the vitality of the Arabic source-code in modern Maltese are analyzed.

Novelty of the research consists in using the language material as evidence that the period of stay of the Arabs in Malta was substantially longer and the degree and nature of influence of the Arab civilization on the development of the language and culture of population of Malta were more decisive than it is commonly believed. To use the language material as an argument is important considering the fact that written documents of the period are almost nonexistent, and facts of material culture are scarce. The study of the evolution of Maltese from a dialect of Arabic to the state language of Malta (non-Arabic Catholic country) is a contribution to development of the typology of Arabic dialects and helps to understand the possible path of their development.

 

This study deals with the politeness strategies of speakers of Russian, focusing on verbal expression of politeness. After running a field survey in schools in mid-2018, we try to analyze specific verbal markers of expressing politeness quantitatively. Four such markers were selected for this study, namely greeting, leave-taking, expressing gratitude and apology. Quantitative analysis shows that there is a clear frequency pattern found in these markers’ use, indicating a relatively high degree of sociolinguistic variation. Possible causes of this effect are discussed, including cultural diversity and multilingual setting of the modern Russian school communicative domain.

In this paper, a description of sentential negation makers in Russian Sign Language (RSL) is provided. Two types of these markers exist. The first one is a negative sign – a manual negator. The second type is markers that are expressed by facial expressions, and head movements – non-manual negation. Moreover, this observation of sentential negation presents the frequency of manual negators, and the distribution of non-manual negation. The data also shows that in negative constructions the basic word order changes. In addition, I offer an analysis that deals with this phenomenon.

The paper deals with the intonation of native speakers of several regional variants of Russian. I analyze how simple characteristics of pitch movement are connected to biological sex, age, place of living, and type of spontaneous text. According to my primary hypothesis, the distribution of pitch in “low”, “middle” and “high” parts of the pitch range and the number of movements from one range into other ones can predict the aforementioned characteristics of the recordings as well as reveal the individual characteristics of speakers (Vol’skaya 2014, Féry 2017). I demonstrate that in my model the only significant parameter is the biological sex of the speakers, which means that this distribution is unlikely to be determined by the regional differences. The study has been conducted as a part of the project on statistical analysis of regional variants of Standard Russian and minority languages of Russia.

Lemmatisation, which is one of the most important stages of text preprocessing, consists in grouping the inflected forms of a word together so they can be analysed as a single item. This task is often considered solved for most modern languages irregardless of their morphological type, but the situation is dramatically different for ancient languages. Rich inflectional system and high level of orthographic variation common to these languages together with lack of resources make lemmatising historical data a challenging task. It becomes more and more important as manuscripts are being extensively digitized now, but still remains poorly covered in literature. In this work, I compare a rule-based and a neural network based approach to lemmatisation in case of Early Irish data.

In the early 19th century the words predanie, legenda, and skazanie started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper considers the texts with these labels in their titles or subtitles written by Vladimir Odoevsky. First, constituent features of the corpus of the texts labeled as predanie are identified. Then the same categories are explored in the texts marked as legenda and skazanie. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether these texts are built according to similar or different generic patterns. I argue that Odoevsky treated the notions differently, and the generically labelled texts reveal different genre strategies.

Although conflict representation in media has been widely studied, few attempts have been made to perform large-scale comparisons of agendas in the media of conflicting parties, especially for armed country-level confrontations. In this paper, we introduce quantitative evidence of agenda divergence between the media of conflicting parties in the course of the Ukrainian crisis 2013-2014. Using 45,000 messages from the online newsfeeds of a Russian and a Ukrainian TV channels, we perform topic modelling coupled with qualitative analysis to reveal crisis-related topics, assess their salience and map evolution of attention of both channels to each of those topics. We find that the two channels produce fundamentally different agenda sequences: in particular, while the Russian channel pays little attention to confrontation between the Ukrainian government and the opposition before the regime change, the Ukrainian channel is less inclined to cover armed violence in East Ukraine and refugees after the regime change.

The main way to mark the direct object in Russian dialects is the accusative case, but in some constructions the NP in direct object position marked by the nominative case. This case considered in the paper like case of Differential Object Marking (DOM) phenomenon, where NP in direct object position in certain conditions can be marked by the nominative case, but in “normal” conditions it marked by accusative case. The study describes this phenomenon in the North Russian dialects. Some different syntactic constructions with the nominative objects considered from the point of the DOM features: animacy, definiteness, word order, information structure, modality of predicates. In addition, the paper describes the issue of historical development of the constructions and the issue about syntactic status.

The topics explored in this essay include Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s reading practices in his young and mature years, reconstructed on the basis of various sources. The paper recontextualizes Krylov’s unique reading trajectory not always comprehensible for his contemporaries. It also highlights numerous links, not accentuated earlier, between Krylov’s strategies — in life, writing and publishing — and his service as a librarian in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg. The analysis of several situations showing Krylov as a brilliant reciter of his own texts who smartly deals with expectations and obsessions of his audience allows to affirms the existence a special connection, of his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the literary genre of fable and the status of classical writer obtained by Krylov by 1830. Sub specie of this connection the transformations of the circle of Krylov’s readers are represented, as well as different ways of perception of his fables by children.

The paper presents a Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme for a learner English corpus. The REALEC dataset consists of essays written in English by Russian-speaking university students in the course of general English. The essays are a part of students' preparation for the independent final examination similar to the international English exam. While adjusting existing dependency parsing tools to a learner data, one has to take into account to what extent students' mistakes provoke errors in the parser output. The ungrammatical and stylistically inappropriate utterances may challenge parsers' algorithms trained on grammatically appropriate written texts. In our experiments, we compared the output of the dependency parser UDpipe (trained on UD-English 2.0) with the results of manual parsing, placing a particular focus on parses of ungrammatical English clauses. We show how mistakes made by students influence the work of the parser. Overall, UDpipe performed reasonably well (UAS 92.9, LAS 91.7). The following cases cause the errors in automatic annotation a) incorrect detection of a head, b) incorrect detection of the relation type, as well as c) both. We propose some solutions which could improve the automatic output and thus make the assessment of syntactic complexity more reliable.

Learner corpora have great potential as sources of educational material. If a corpus contains annotations of mistakes in student works, it can be of use for the recognition and analysis of the most common error patterns. The error-annotation system of the learner corpus REALEC makes it possible to automatically generate different types of test questions and thus form exercises from the corpus data. This paper describes the creation of an automatic multiple-choice generator which works with the specific types of the student errors annotated in the texts of examination essays.

The paper discusses the main uses of a synthetic causative marker in Chukchi with special reference to non-causative effects of causative morphology. The causative morpheme expresses general causation when attached to patientive intransitive and some agentive intransitive predicates, namely verbs of directed motion, change of posture and ingestion. Other agentive predicates, intransitive as well as transitive, resist causativization and receive some non-causative interpretation if they form causatives. Such causative verbs usually have applicative-like or rearranging functions.

In this paper, I describe and analyze several types of nonverbal predication in Chukchi. Following [Matushansky 2008, 2010], I assume that Case is a realization of bundle formed by percolation of features assigned by different heads above the terminal node and explain the equative/absolutive variation in case-marking pattern observed in Chukchi nominal predication by feature percolation. The analysis of nominal predicational constructions is then extended to account for peculiar properties of adjectival predication.

In this paper, we argue that the imperative paradigm of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, Itelmen and Kerek, often viewed as morphologically homogeneous, is — at least in terms of its morphology — a composition of several independent inflectional categories.

The paper describes the ongoing research project on Ninilchik Russian as a unique variety of the Russian language. We believe it is a remnant of Alaskan Russian – a language that emerged at the end of the 18th century as a result of Russian colonial presence in Alaska and served as a means of communication in Russian America until the end of the Russian period in 1867. By that time Alaskan Russian became the native language for the people of mixed Russian/Native origin residing in various parts of Alaska. Ninilchik was one such place and, due to many factors combined, became a major location where this linguistic variety kept developing and serving as a means of communication, creating and maintaining cultural identity, and holding together the community of brave, persistent, and self-sustained people. Thanks to the people of Ninilchik, Alaskan Russian is still alive in the 21st century. The paper deals with two aspects of this multifaceted linguistic phenomenon. One is a theoretical problem of the “archaeological approach” to the language data which reflects a rather short but diverse history of Alaskan Russian and involves contact studies. Another is the Ninilchik Russian Dictionary project that allows to record both items and concepts, s well as the sociocultural narratives together making up the special story of the linguistic and cultural community

Donald Trump and his team have often been accused of having close ties to Russia and Russians expressed much greater support for Trump than residents of other countries. This article provides the first systematic analysis of Russian media coverage of Trump's activities during and after the election campaign. It concludes, on the basis of a sentiment analysis of relevant articles and network agendas of 500 Russian magazines and 250 leading federal newspapers, that Trump's media portrayal was not necessarily positive. During the election, Trump was portrayed by the Russian media not as Russia's favorite candidate, but as Hillary Clinton's opponent and a critic of U.S. recent policies. Only for a short period after Trump's victory in the elections, did the Russian media represent him as a friend of Russia, since there was hope that the new president would lift political and economic sanctions. Trump's policies failed to meet the expectations of the Russian people, and from the beginning of 2017, media coverage of Trump has become critical, hopes for lifting of political sanctions have weakened, and public opinion about the U.S. president has turned negative.

The paper addresses three controversial issues in two romances by Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion and Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart. Both romances were written around 1176-1180 and because of their narrative continuity and complementarity could be considered as a diptych. First, we examine the evolution of Chretien’s conception of love, “mysteriously” changing from his first romances to Lancelot; then we enter into the debate between celtisants and their critics about the Celtic influence in Chretien and consider Celtic sources of the two romances; we conclude the article, tracing out the fairy tale paradigm in both romances, which helps us reveal new meanings of the cart and the lion, operating as magic agents in the romances.

The purpose of this study is to test the agenda-setting theory, according to which the media has a significant impact on what people consider to be important events. We compare the results of the Levada Center surveys on the most memorable events of the month with the number of publications on these issues in the press. We focused on the period from January 2014 to December 2016. A total of 884 events were analyzed in the article. The results of the study confirm the impact of discussions in the media on people's attention to the problem. The results also show that the discussions in the media one week before the date of polling are more important than the issues covered over the entire month. People better remember those events which took place shortly before the polling, as well as the events the discussion of which intensified during this period. It is also important to note the role of regional publications in the sensitization of the public to various issues. The issues covered by the national newspapers and news agencies, but ignored by the regional press, are much worse remembered by the population. The results of the study are controlled for background of the discussion: the presence of important events in each relevant month, which monopolized the public attention, is taken into account.

December 19, 2016, saw three tragedies simultaneously, that could not go unnoticed by the Russian media: dozens of people died as a result of a surrogate alcohol poisoning in Irkutsk, a Russian ambassador was killed in Turkey, and a terrorist attack took place at the Christmas market in Berlin. In this article using the network agenda theory we analyze how these tragedies were covered by various types of mass media: on 11 federal TV channels, in 1,974 print newspapers, in 34,905 online newspapers and 2,574 blogs. We believe that direct and indirect control of the agenda by the state can be exercised by creating a network of events that will canalize correctly discussions about tragedies. We showed that ties between the tragedy and a network of other acute issues are more important than objective circumstances, such as the number of victims or a geography of the event. The context in which the events were looked at led to greater attention to the killing of the ambassador and less attention to surrogate alcohol poisoning. The Russian mass media paid significantly less attention to the Berlin terror attack, it yet was used as a supplement to the demonstration of importance of the fight against terrorism.