Фахове видання Київського університету імені Бориса Грінченка
Київський столичний університет імені Бориса Грінченка
‘Changing Hats’ and Deixis of First-person Plural Pronouns in J.D. Vance’s 2025 Munich Speech
Speeches of modern politicians supply linguists with the material to study how global and local political, social, cultural and economic changes are promoted or resisted in a particular context. These texts may be approached from the point of view of their linguistic structure as well as from a perspective of their embeddedness in discourse. The article explores the scope of the first-person plural pronouns as they were used by US Vice President JD Vance in his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, so as to demonstrate the connection between the context and language forms. The study draws on the notions of personal deixis (grammatical encoding of participants in an interaction) and footing (a stance or alternating stances taken by a participant in an interaction) and hypothesizes that in Vance’s speech, the first-person plural pronouns, namely personal, possessive and reflexive types, vary in scope and include, besides the speaker, different entities, which is related to the politician’s switch of footing. The research makes use of quantitative analysis to assess the importance of the first-person plural pronouns in the speech compared to the second-person pronouns. At the next stage, contextual analysis is applied to clarify the reference scope of the first-person plural pronouns. The study reveals a 2 to 1 ratio of the first-person pronouns (66.9%) to the second-person pronouns (33.1%). The first-person plural pronouns account for 35.6% occurrences and outnumber the first-person singular pronouns (31.3%). Accordingly, Vance’s speech focuses on the speaker. Contextual analysis uncovers that the Vice President uses the first-person plural pronouns to refer to himself and some other referent. The latter may be (1) another person (his spouse and another politician), (2) the Trump administration, (3) the American people, and (4) the USA and its allies (the EU, and the UK). Hence, it may be concluded that first-person plural pronouns facilitate the speaker’s switch of social roles in political discourse.
Copyright (c) 2026 Iryna Alyeksyeyeva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
COCA as a Representative Corpus for the Study of Basic Emotions in Contemporary English
The article explores six nominal labels for basic emotions in contemporary English, based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise. The selected nouns are not interpreted as direct evidence of inner affective experience. They are analysed as lexical units whose corpus profile is formed by recurrent co-occurrence, grammatical relations, collocational environment, clusters, and concordance contexts. The study combines procedures of corpus linguistics with lexical-semantic interpretation and linguistic research on emotion. The theoretical basis includes work on corpus representativeness, lexical semantics, the theory of basic emotions, and the distinction between emotion-label words and emotion-laden words. COCA was selected because its register-balanced and chronologically stratified design makes it suitable for analysing contemporary American English usage. The material was obtained using the COCA tools Word, Topics, Collocates, Clusters, Texts/Virtual Corpora, and Concordance Lines. The frequency distribution in the six-item sample is as follows: fear - 103,493; surprise - 60,286; anger - 36,471; happiness - 22,057; sadness - 8,851; disgust - 5,436. The analysis prioritises not frequency lists in isolation, but recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns. Fear occurs mainly with nominal and clausal complementation; anger is characterized by prepositional directionality and verbs of expression or regulation; sadness is profiled through intensifiers and perceptible signs; happiness regularly enters axiological contexts of well-being, aspiration, and life purpose; disgust combines bodily aversion with moral evaluation; and surprise functions both as a nominal label for an unexpected event and as a marker of its expectedness or unexpectedness. The findings indicate that COCA makes it possible to describe nominal emotion labels not merely as dictionary entries, but as contextually profiled units of the language system.
Copyright (c) 2026 Nataliia Bober https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Onomastic Universe of the Graphic Novel The Sandman by Neil Gaiman: Strategies and Challenges of the Ukrainian Translation
The article provides a comprehensive translation analysis of the onomastic system in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel The Sandman within the context of its modern Ukrainian translation. This study explores how proper names function as essential meaning-bearing elements in a unique intermedial setting. The onomasticon incorporates diverse mythological traditions – Ancient, Norse, and Sumerian – alongside biblical allusions and significant links to DC Comics lore. Within the theoretical framework, the definitions of “onomastic”, “onym”, and various sub-types of onyms are clarified, allowing for a more precise classification of the names of fictional entities and locations within the graphic narrative. It is substantiated that onyms in Neil Gaiman’s text serve not only as means of nomination but also as powerful cognitive markers performing informational, pragmatic, and individualizing functions. Onyms are among the most interesting units of a literary text, as they do not merely distinguish an object from a series of similar ones but also endow it with additional expressive and semantic characteristics. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of translation strategies for rendering various categories of onyms, specifically theonyms (names of gods), anthroponyms, and toponyms. The study provides an overview of the methods used to achieve translational equivalence, including transcoding (transliteration and transcription), calquing, and the use of established historical equivalents. It is demonstrated that to preserve the author’s multilayered intent, the translator frequently resorts to combined techniques. The research demonstrates that the Ukrainian rendering of The Sandman's onomastic landscape represents a highly effective cross-cultural and linguistic transfer. The study further highlights that the translator acts as a crucial cultural mediator, ensuring that the symbolic and stylistic layers of Gaiman’s universe remain both accessible and relatable for the Ukrainian audience.
Copyright (c) 2026 Iryna Vasylenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Structure of Diplomatic Speeches: Analysis of the UN Security Council Meetings on Ukraine in 2024
The diplomatic discourse at the UN Security Council regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine presents a unique context to analyze the structure of diplomatic speeches while events are still unfolding. This article considers diplomatic speech, the main genre of diplomatic discourse in meetings of the UN Security Council. The primary objective of the analysis is to reconstruct the neutral diplomatic speeches and the defensive reactions of diplomats and various invited representatives during the discussion, based on the current situation between Ukraine and Russia. The mentioned speeches were examined in light of the theory of semantic primitives and A. Wierzbicka’s classification of action frames. The conducted analysis highlights the language as a powerful tool to reflect dynamics, intentions, reactions, and strategic positioning in diplomatic interactions. Additionally, the article explores how representatives from different countries use language to shape their narratives, protect international interests, and influence the international community. Special attention is given to distinguishing the difference between neutral and subjectively colored statements, which provides deeper insight into the mechanisms of covert manipulation and diplomatic strategies. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates linguistics, communication theory, and political analysis, the article offers a comprehensive look at contemporary trends in diplomatic discourse during the armed conflict. The role of action frames in building arguments and defining the positions of parties in the international arena is examined in detail. This approach opens new perspectives for studying diplomatic discourse and developing effective strategies for international communication in crisis situations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mariia Holtseva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The The Dominant Present-tense Verb Form in the Lyrical Poetry by Mykola Kholodnyi
The article deals with the poetic functioning of dominant verb forms, in particular present tense verb forms in the lyrics by the poet of the sixties period Mykola Kholodnyi. The poetic ways to actualize morphological forms and meanings, which are singled out and systematized in the works by Olena Skorobohatova, the scholar, Kharkiv philological school representative, researcher of the poetic language morphology, are highlighted. It is established that along with a number of ways and techniques to feature linguistic units in poetic texts that contribute to the actualization of lexical and grammatical semantics, one of the main methods of actualization in the works by Mykola Kholodnyi is the poetic technique of concentration of morphologically similar units, the result of which in some cases is the formation of the grammatical dominant of the poem or its fragment. The dominant present tense verb forms are accentuated, indicating static, unchanging life situations. It is found out that the poet organically combines morphologically related categories of tense, person and number to create images, mostly socially unequal, opposed by different levels of life. Poetic techniques and principles (concentration, juxtaposition, repetition, the principle of compositionality) are outlined, which essentially influences creating poetic meaning and, along with the grammatical categories of the verb, constitute an individual authorial system of means for reproducing reality and events witnessed by the author himself. The author's individual way to create poetic meaning is defined as the poet's creativity modus. Comprehension of this concept is based on the definition of the term "modus" in the dictionary by Anatolii Zahnitko, as well as on the general scientific definition given in the Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zhanna Honcharova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Lexical-semantic Field "Migration" in Contemporary British News Discourse: Semantic and Quantitative Dimensions through Critical Discourse Analysis
The study addresses the issue of how Middle East migration is linguistically represented and conceptualised in contemporary British news discourse by means of lexical-semantic fields. The main aim of the study is to model the lexical-semantic field “MIGRATION” in order to identify how its internal hierarchical structure reflects and reinforces ideological attitudes and discursive patterns related to Middle East migrants. The academic importance of the study is defined by its contribution to the integration of lexical semantics and critical discourse analysis. The study is practically important since it contributes to uncover mechanisms through which mass media shapes the public perception of migrants and migration. The study applies corpus-assisted modelling of lexical-semantic field and critical discourse analysis, which involved corpus compilation, the search of 37 contextual synonyms to the core noun of the field, the lexical-semantic field frequency-based modelling, and the interpretation of the data. The findings reveal that the nucleus of the field is represented by lexical items directly denoting migration, its core participants, and notions of temporary residence. The perinuclear zone is represented by lexical items denoting legal and administrative frameworks, statistical markers and transportation, while the periphery is represented by notions of movement, crossing the border, statistical markers, and common abstract nouns. The analysis demonstrates that migration is often framed as a regulated, quantifiable, negative and problem-oriented phenomenon, whereas migrants are often depersonalised by the regular use of statistical markers and metonymic substitutions resulting in the reduction of migrants’ agency. The study demonstrates that the hierarchical structure of the studied lexical-semantic field reflects the discursive model in which migration is associated with crisis, regulation, illegality. The current study contributes to the field by addressing the linguistic means by which Middle East migrants are represented in the discourse and by providing a framework for further studies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Artem Hurhish https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Possessive Constructions in East Polissian Dialects: East Slavic Context
Dialectal morphology and, to a lesser extent, syntax have been relatively well documented in Ukrainian and, more broadly, in East Slavic dialectology. Notwithstanding this achievement, certain morphosyntactic characteristics have received limited attention, particularly from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. One of these aspects is the encoding of possession in East Polissian (or northeastern) Ukrainian dialects. Possession, as universal, is a fundamental grammatical category, yet its diverse realizations across dialects can shed light on both historical developments and typological patterns within Slavic and European languages. This study addresses this point by examining frequent strategies that East Polissian dialects employ to convey possessive relations. Drawing on data derived from a personal corpus of dialectal speech, complemented by other primary sources, the analysis focuses on the most salient possessive constructions. Among these, external possessive constructions—based on the esse (‘be’) locative model—emerge as a particularly prominent feature. The findings reveal both continuity with other East Slavic varieties and localized innovations that distinguish East Polissian from other Ukrainian and East Slavic dialect groups. By providing an account of possessive constructions, this research not only fills a descriptive lacuna in East Slavic dialectology but also contributes to typological debates on possession and grammatical encoding more generally. The results have implications for a more comprehensive understanding of internal variation within Ukrainian, as well as for a more balanced areal-typological assessment of East Slavic within the broader framework of European languages.
Copyright (c) 2026 Salvatore Del Gaudio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Semantic Class of Emission Situation Vocabulary: a Contrastive-Typological Perspective
The paper focuses on the semantic class of vocabulary denoting emission situations (sound and smell emission) from a contrastive-typological perspective. The aim of the study is to characterize the conceptual organization, argument structure, and directions of semantic derivation of emission verbs in English, German, French, Polish, and Ukrainian. The methodological framework of the research is based on descriptive, componential, and contrastive methods, as well as elements of cognitive-semantic analysis. The study shows that the emission situation is structured as a multidimensional concept comprising an internal domain (invariant perceptual features) and an external domain (situational, evaluative, locative, gradational, and other parameters). The analysis identifies specific constituents of both the internal and external domains of the concept for each subclass of emission vocabulary, reflecting the properties of the respective perceptual channels. Emission verbs display considerable derivational potential and realize regular semantic shifts toward the domains of state, behavior, mental activity, and evaluation. A cross-linguistic comparison of the selected languages reveals the presence of universal principles underlying the organization of emission vocabulary alongside language-specific realizations of particular semantic components. Thus, emission vocabulary emerges as a multidimensional system reflecting the interaction between human perceptual experience and the linguistic worldview, and it demonstrates significant potential for further typological research.
Copyright (c) 2026 Oleh Demenchuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language Policy of Ukraine: Post-colonial Traditions and Anti-colonial Tendencies
The article describes common features of the colonial impact of Russia in the form of empire and the Soviet Union on the language policy of Ukraine, specifics of anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial manifestations caused by the deliberate purposeful influence of pro-Russian politicians and unconscious creation of norms of the Ukrainian language and foundations of the language policy under the influence of the inertia formed in the colonial society. Two factors of Ukraine's language policy were highlighted: the codification of literary language norms, and the legislative consolidation of the statuses of languages functioning in Ukraine, along with their specific uses in various aspects of social life. The article also describes the influence of Ukrainian linguists' inertia and the habit of perceiving Ukrainian language phenomena through the prism of the Russian language, as well as codifying the norms of the Ukrainian literary language by analogy with the Russian language. The article analyzes Ukraine’s language legislation, which establishes the status of Ukrainian as the state language and addresses the languages of indigenous peoples and national minorities. It also examines the normative regulation of the Russian language prior to the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation, when pro-Russian politicians systematically promoted its special status, limiting the use of Ukrainian and neglecting the languages of indigenous peoples and national minorities. Additionally, the article addresses the current status of Russian as the language of the aggressor and occupying country. The positive impact of the expert assessments by the Council of Europe and its bodies on Ukraine's language legislation, particularly in ensuring the language rights of national minorities, has been demonstrated.
Copyright (c) 2026 Olena Dotsenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Cognitive-Spatial Topology of "Star Wars" Film Discourse
Current research on fictional worlds is dominated by the analysis of micro-level phenomena, while the holistic spatial-hierarchical organization of media franchises remains underexplored. This article hypothesizes that the Star Wars discourse functions as a multilevel anthropocentric system structured by linguocognitive markers and subject to diachronic shifts. The analysis of the ideologically "colored" construction and spatial organization of the alternative world in the audiovisual discourse of the "Star Wars" media franchise is carried out on the basis of the universal model of open system organization. The empirical data comprises utterances from the franchise's English-language audiovisual texts, as well as literary sources from both the canonical universe and the expanded universe (legends category), selected through purposive analysis. The results establish that the franchise's conceptosphere is organized as a hierarchy of levels (micro-, cata-, macro-, meso-, and mega-levels), each verbalized by specific concepts and performing the functions of spatial cognitive categorization and social identity construction. The study describes and analyzes the phenomenon of discursive shift, which reflects changes in cognitive matrices depending on the chronotope.
Copyright (c) 2026 Taras Zhytnyk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Mental Models of the Russian–Ukrainian War: A Popular Science Perspective
The article addresses the specificity of mental modeling of the Russian-Ukrainian War based on articles from the English popular science media platform The Conversation. A triangulation model for the study of popular science discourse is proposed, conceptualizing it as a complex integrative cognitive-communicative-semiotic formation aimed at popularizing specialized scientific knowledge for a broad non-professional audience and constructing recipients’ mental models for its comprehension. The mental structuring of the events of the Russian-Ukrainian War is carried out through a landscape model, which represents war experience as a multidimensional cognitive space integrating the landscapes of actions, reflections, emotions, and bodily-physiological experience, verbalized through linguistic and discursive means at both micro- and macro-levels. The action landscape models the glocal dynamics of the conflict; the reflective landscape objectifies the analysis of military-political decisions and the features of their individual and collective interpretation; the emotional landscape represents affective responses to wartime events; the bodily-physiological landscape reflects the transformation of cognitive risk assessments into states of anxiety and tension. All landscapes are verbalized through the prism of political, psychological, economic, media, and historical discourses, integrating into a unified transdiscursive configuration.
Copyright (c) 2026 Natalya Izotova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
From Discourse to Mechanics: a Five-markedness Framework for Analyzing Lovecraftian Horror in Digital Games
The emergence of digital platforms of games marketed as “Lovecraftian” raises a question that has not yet been systematically addressed in academic discourse: how does a game that truly immerses the player in the world of Lovecraftian horror differ from one that merely borrows its visual elements? This article presents an analytical model based on a corpus analysis of three of Lovecraft's works – “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – which identifies five categories of markedness that structure the discourse surrounding Lovecraftian horror: time, fear, revulsion, strangeness/unnaturalness, and knowledge/mystery. Each of these categories is subsequently matched with its potential gaming counterpart in various digital games. The analysis reveals a clear hierarchy of transmedial convertibility: markedness associated with fear and time is converted into game mechanics with high fidelity, while revulsion is realised only partially, whilst strangeness and knowledge/mystery inherently resist conversion – the former due to the Euclidean constraints of modern game engines, and the latter due to the fundamental role of knowledge as a reward in game design. Accordingly, a four-level typology of discursive fidelity is proposed: full realisation, partial realisation, discursive enclave and aesthetic borrowing.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrii Isakov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Means of Communicative Manipulation Strategy Implemented by Teenage Characters (Based on American Film Discourse)
This article examines the communicative strategy of manipulation in speech behavior of teenage characters, based on American film discourse. Manipulation is defined as a covert psychological influence aimed at shaping the interlocutor’s thoughts, intentions, or actions without their awareness, making them believe their decisions are self-determined. The study treats manipulation as a pragmalinguistic phenomenon realized through verbal and nonverbal means. The research is grounded in multiple theoretical approaches to communicative strategy, including pragmalinguistic, intentional, and communicative perspectives. A communicative strategy is understood as a planned sequence of speech actions aimed at achieving a specific communicative goal. Manipulation, in this context, may either support cooperative interaction or serve confrontational and aggressive purposes depending on a communicative situation. The empirical material consists of 872 dialogic fragments from 27 American films (1985–2017), covering genres such as comedy, drama, thriller, and adventure. Through discourse, pragmatic, and stylistic analysis, the study identifies key tactics and linguistic means used by teenage characters. Three main aspects of manipulative strategy are distinguished: cooperative, confrontational, and aggressive. In a cooperative aspect, dominant tactics are suggestion and distortion of information and insincere surprise. These tactics aim to harmonize communication and subtly influence an interlocutor. They are primarily realized through representative and expressive speech acts. Linguistically, they rely on modal words, hedging, epistemic constructions, rhetorical and elliptical sentences, and modal verbs. Nonverbal elements such as tone, facial expressions, and gestures enhance their effect. In a confrontational aspect, manipulation is mainly implemented through quasi-argumentation and fictitious indignation. These tactics create an illusion of logical reasoning or emotional reaction to influence an interlocutor. They are characterized by the use of vulgarisms, slang, epithets, reinforcing particles, and rhetorical constructions, often violating politeness norms and communicative maxims. In an aggressive aspect, the leading tactic is appealing to the interlocutor’s sensory sphere, aimed at exerting emotional pressure. This involves expressive language, imperative forms, modal verbs, and strong emotional vocabulary, supported by prosodic and kinetic cues. The study concludes that teenage manipulation in film discourse is multifaceted, combining linguistic, pragmatic, and psychological elements. It highlights prevalence of specific tactics and emphasizes the role of both verbal and nonverbal means in achieving manipulative goals.
Copyright (c) 2026 Oleh Makarevych, Nataliia Plakhotniuk, Stepan Davydovych https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Genre Specificity of Contemporary Journalistic Automotive Reviews
The article examines the genre-specific features of contemporary journalistic automotive reviews, which combine informative, evaluative, and persuasive functions and represent an important segment of media discourse. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing influence of expert reviews on consumer behaviour and the need for structurally organized texts in a digital environment characterized by high information load. The purpose of the research is to identify the key structural components of journalistic automotive reviews, the particularities of textual organization, and the interaction between technical specifications and subjective driving impressions. Analysis of English-language journalistic automotive reviews corpus demonstrates a stable compositional model of the genre, which includes an introductory contextual section, competitor comparison, interior and exterior assessment, a technical block, driving impressions, and a concluding summary with factual data. Special attention is paid to logical cohesion and content structuring. The driving impressions section illustrates the transformation of technical information into the experience of driving, which forms the basis of the evaluative component of the review. The conclusions emphasize that the effectiveness of the genre is grounded in the interaction of technical accuracy, discursive organization, and expert interpretation, which together ensure both accessibility and authority of the text for a broad readership.
Copyright (c) 2026 Larysa Meleshkevych https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Translation of Geographical Realia of the Apocalyptic Novel
This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of translating nominative units from the apocalyptic novel, focusing on “realia” and “irrealia” as markers of the fictional world. The study examines the context-dependent nature of these lexical units, their categorization across the thematic group of geographical referents, and the unique challenges they pose in apocalyptic literature translation. The study integrates L. Venuti’s strategies of domestication and foreignization with A. Popovič’s theory of stylistic shifts to address the reconstruction of the fictional world in Ukrainian translations. This article highlights the significance of irrealia as products of the author’s imagination and the necessity of special translation tactics such as intensification and substitution to preserve the genre’s stylistic features and pragmatic potential across cultures. The conclusions of the research demonstrate that the choice of translation strategy and tactics is functionally dependent on the type of nomination.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maryna Movchan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Verbo-gestural Effects in U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s 2025 Munich Speech
The paper reveals how US vice president J.D. Vance’s hand gestures accompanying the 2025 Munich speech support the accusation effect created by the verbal means. The applied “transforming idea into effect” procedure takes into account discursive and cognitive semiotic perspectives of speech production. The gestures studied in the paper comprise outstretching the right or the left hand as well as outstretching or clasping both hands. The gestures are interpreted relative to the three parts of accompanied utterances: pre-gestural, expressing the speaker’s intention prior to hand movement; gestural, simultaneous with the hand movement; post-gestural, following the gestural part if it opens the statement. It is found that the outstretching of the right or left hand is associated with the visuospatial and logical functions of the corresponding hemispheres of the brain. Consequently, the pre-gestural parts of the utterances involving the right-hand movement refer to the speaker’s personal experience while the utterances accompanied by the left-hand movement refer to mental operations related to thinking over the past, present or future as well as to the use of negation. Meanwhile, the simultaneous use of both hands combines the visuospatial and logical functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain contributing to the formation of image schemas, i.e. dynamic recurring patterns of organism-environment interactions. The outstretching of both hands evokes the CONTAINER schema, which outlines boundaries, underlying the verbal reference to unity, big quantities or textual cataphoric relations. The clasping hands gesture represents the BLOCKAGE schema symbolizing the speaker’s resentment to particular European policies which is also reflected in a substantial length of the corresponding utterances and in fronting the gestural component to emphasize the accusations made. Keywords: hand gesture, effect, verbal means, discourse, cognitive semiotics, brain, image schema, J.D. Vance, 2025 Munich speech.
Copyright (c) 2026 Serhiy Potapenko, Vasyl Andriyko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Marks in the Margins of the Greek-Latin Psalter and the Secret Correspondence between Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda of Tuscany
The messages encoded in the margins of the Greek-Latin Psalter (Ver. I), which is preserved in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, will be published, described and analyzed in this article. The encoded messages are composed of the words and phrases in Latin from the selected psalms, marked in the margins of the Psalter. The sender of the Message I requests help; its recipient, the sender of the Message II, provides the answer with the instructions. The hypothesis is proposed that the messages were created in the early 1090s, when Empress Adelheid, wife of the Roman Emperor Heinrich IV, daughter of Vsevolod, King of the Rus’, guarded and isolated by her husband, secretly sought the help of Countess Matilda of Tuscany (also known as Matilda of Canossa), aiming to escape. The encoded messages can provide additional information to the few records in the concurrent sources that wrote about the rescue of the Empress, which was ogranized by Countess Matilda of Tuscany and conducted the group led by her husband, Duke Welf V of Bavaria. Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda of Tuscany exchanged important information encoded with the help of marks, drawn in the margins of the Greek-Latin Psalter. Choice of the Psalter as the means of communication contributed significantly to the successful rescue of the Empress, given Adelheid’s dramatic situation and the ongoing hostilities between Emperor Heinrich IV and Countess Matilda of Tuscany.
Copyright (c) 2026 Dana Radvan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Adequacy of Economic Terminology Translation. The Advantage of Human Translation over Machine Translation?
The article examines the specific features of translating economic terminology and the problem of ensuring its adequacy. The translation of economic texts functions as an important means of interinstitutional communication, directly influencing market behavior and serving as a tool for ensuring compliance with international norms and standards. The importance of specialized translation of economic texts is confirmed by the practice of multilingual publication of documents by international organizations. Institutions such as the World Bank, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and others provide access to their documents in multiple languages, making translation accuracy critically important in such texts. Accordingly, consistency and precision in rendering economic terminology are essential, since ambiguous interpretation of terms or phrases in documentation may lead to misinterpretation of provisions, create legal gaps, or complicate the fulfillment of contractual obligations by the parties involved. In this context, the problem of evaluating the quality of economic terminology translation – particularly through a comparison of human translation and neural machine translation systems – gains special scientific and practical relevance. The active implementation of machine translation technologies contributes to the optimization of translation processes and the reduction of translation costs. The economic efficiency of automated solutions facilitates their increasing integration into modern workflows. Therefore, a comprehensive study of the operational parameters and capabilities of machine translation systems has attracted considerable attention from both the academic community and business sectors. The study analyzes the terminological adequacy of translated economic vocabulary and provides quantitative calculations of translation errors. The results demonstrate that the translation produced by a neural machine translation system contained approximately 43 errors (about 8.15% of the total), whereas the human translation contained only about 3 errors (0.56%). The findings indicate that although neural machine translation can achieve a relatively high level of adequacy (approximately 91%), this level still does not fully meet the requirements for translating specialized economic texts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Yevgenii Rudov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Conceptual Metaphors of Skin and Beauty: Analysis of Skincare Advertising in English and Lithuanian
The aim of the research is to identify and compare conceptual metaphors of skin and beauty in English and Lithuanian skincare advertisements, find their similarities and differences, and determine the frequency of their use in advertisements for women’s skincare products. The article discusses the premises underlying the emergence of the theory of conceptual metaphors in cognitive linguistics, and analyses the characteristics of metaphorical language in advertising discourse. It explains how advertisers often propose new and creative metaphors, and apply creative manipulations of conventional metaphors. This section also provides a more detailed overview of advertisements targeting women, their influence on the perception of beauty. It examines which standards of female beauty help marketers sell products and what women (unconsciously) associate with beauty, thereby falling into the advertisers’ traps. The empirical part is analysing examples of advertisements featuring English and Lithuanian conceptual metaphors. Based on the systematic nature and thematic focus of linguistic elements, skincare advertisements were collected and compared, and four conceptual metaphors were identified within the domain of reference skin / skincare /skin beauty: skin is living being, skincare is a battle, skincare is a journey, skin beauty is glow. The analysis of the collected examples suggests that conceptual metaphors are frequently used in both English and Lithuanian beauty advertisements for skincare products, conveying that advertisers wish to impart to the advertised products. Although English and Lithuanian belong to different language types (analytic and synthetic), the figurative meaning conveyed in skincare advertisements largely overlaps across the two languages. The frequency calculations of conceptual metaphors show that the most frequent conceptual metaphor in English skincare advertisements is skincare is war, while in Lithuanian ones it is skin is a living being.
Copyright (c) 2026 Linas Selmistraitis, Viktorija Romanova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Distribution of Addressee’s Attention in News Headlines
The goal of the paper is to examine how readers’ attention is split across different structural positions in English news headlines, drawing on denoted relations established by various morphosyntactic constructions. The latter are defined as form-meaning pairings entrenched in long-term memory in a ready-made form, requiring less cognitive effort when speakers choose a necessary linguistic unit. Three headline constituents encompass the attractor, catching the recipient's eye; the keeper, retaining their attention; and the nudger, stimulating them to turn to the text body. The attention-distributing structure of news headlines is filled in with various communicative constructs as speech manifestations of mentally fixed morphosyntactic constructions: agentive, predicate, locative, causal, content- and recipient-naming, purpose-related, temporal. Agentive constructs, used in the attention-grabbing position of the headline, have a high persuasive status as they denote entities close to the target audience. The most convincing are constructs with one or two slots filled, as they name famous personalities, while the status of ordinary people is increased by a toponym, a component designating an unusual characteristic, and numerals indicating a large number of event participants. The keeper is filled in with the predicate pairings, which denote acts of speaking, damage infliction, social coercion, motion, transfer, aspects of the action, emotions of the participants, and entity existence. The nudger can contain various types of communicative constructs with causal being the predominant ones; locative pairings indicating a place in the proximity or vital for the readers; recipient-naming units, denoting the person getting some benefit or obtaining some object; content-naming constructs, representing the information expressed by the event participant; purpose-related pairings, reflecting an exceptional aim of the happening; and the least numerous temporal units, giving the approximate time of the event or indicating an unexpected duration of the occurrence.
Copyright (c) 2026 Nataliia Talavira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Distinctive Features of Rendering English Solar Photovoltaic Terms into Ukrainian
The article presents research on structural models and techniques of translation solar photovoltaic (PV) terms in modern English scientific and technical discourse into Ukrainian necessitated by the rising significance of photovoltaic applications in the current Ukrainian context due to their efficiency and sustainability across various spheres of life. The article is aimed at discovering the distinctive features of rendering solar photovoltaic terms into Ukrainian by investigating their lexical and grammatical characteristics. The object of the research is English solar photovoltaic terms and their Ukrainian equivalents. The subject of the study is the techniques of rendering English photovoltaic terms into Ukrainian. The linguistic and extralinguistic peculiarities of scientific and technical texts have been clarified. The notion of ‘term’ in modern scientific and technical discourse has been elucidated. The works on translation of English terminology connected with environmental sustainability in the sphere of energy efficiency, alternative energy and biogas production have been analyzed. It was discovered that the English solar photovoltaic terms have not been the object of a separate investigation in translation studies yet. The findings of the study of the photovoltaic terms in a scientific and technical article on recent advancement in solar photovoltaic technology present the variety of the structural models of solar photovoltaic terms with the prevalent one that consists of an adjective and a noun. The application of the techniques of loan translation, addition, structural transposition and practical transcription turned out to be the distinctive features of rendering English solar photovoltaic terms into Ukrainian.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tetiana Tyshchenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Adaptation in Speculative Fiction Translation (Case Study of Charlie Huston’s “Catchpenny”)
This paper focuses on showcasing the practical application of adaptation in translating speculative fiction and, in particular, the meaningful names and irrealia involved in the author’s world-building. The material was provided by the American author and screenwriter’s novel Catchpenny (2024) and its Ukrainian translation by the writer of this article, published in 2025. The main goals pursued by this research were to find the names and irrealia where adaptation was used, to describe their semantic elements, to see how much of their semantics was preserved in adaptation, and to discover whether adaptation was possible for all such units. The achievement of those goals required thorough studying of the following key aspects: adaptation strategies in translation (a well-developed area of translation studies embodied in multiple papers and many years of research); translation of proper names, specifically meaningful names (an age-old but still completely relevant translatology problem); translation of irrealia (a comparatively new area of translation studies with numerous prospects). Researching all these key elements confirmed that the subject and object of this research are relevant and would remain topical for years to come. The study showed that the novel in question (Catchpenny) has more than thirty fictional world-pertaining meaningful names and irrealia. By using the descriptive method, the writer of the research showed in detail how adaptation strategy was applied to these units, by analyzing the semantics of both the originals and the translations and comparing the meanings of both to predict the impact of the Ukrainian versions on the reader. It was established that for most units, it had been possible to preserve the key semantic elements and find ways to adapt them to the cultural and linguistic needs of the Ukrainian reader. The paper also showcases more and less successful adaptations and explains how the translator had decided whether to use adaptation in each particular example.
Copyright (c) 2026 Oleksandra Chernikova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Gothic Tradition of the Mystic Experience Transformation in European Linguoculture
The presented studies may help to view and analyse the mystical not only as a conceptual category, but also from a functional and semantic perspective, providing the opportunity to distinguish certain verbal characteristics of literary artistic texts as non-fiction sacred sources originated from different epochs of human cultural development. This study aims at disclosing cultural and functional specifics of the mystical in the English Gothic prose as a genre feature, compared to the Ukrainian mystic literature in its traditional explication and transformational period of a new era. The research methods are based on a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the study of semantic entities united by the common categorical content. The method of contextual analysis is focused on the immediate context of the linguistic phenomenon, descriptive, content and discourse analyses were applied for systematisation and generalisation of functional and culturally-biased pragmatic specifics of the above-mentioned conceptual category. The synthesis of the Gothic and English literary tradition determines the functioning of verbalized representations of the mystical as a central category of philosophical and aesthetic world perception. In Ukrainian literature it obtained the features of a distinctive phenomenon, genetically-rooted in the culture of popular laughter and focused on deliberate discrepancy between the content and the form to be of the utmost importance in the modern world.
Copyright (c) 2026 Oksana Halych https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/