Humanitarian anthropology includes such a relevant topic as imprisonment. This study models the axiological worldview of World War I prisoners of war (POWs) based on the correspondence written by Austro-Hungarian Czechs between 1916 and 1918. The linguistic analysis of this epistolary discourse makes it possible to identify several value dominants. POW epistolary discourse strongly depends on extralinguistic factors, including the communicative space of the communicants. Presented in speech activity as natural written speech, it constitutes a discursive practice. Despite censorship filters, the natural written speech of POWs remains a significant and objective source for identifying the value dominants within the discursive reflection of this social community. The epistolary discourse of Czech POWs is determined by historical, cultural, political, national, psychological, group, individual, and genre-related factors. The axiological context of this epistolary discourse is represented by a specific set of high-frequency linguistic units with axiological semantics.
This article substantiates the linguistic foundation of moral-ethical intuitions through a systematic analysis of the voice dichotomy, based on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. It describes the opposition between non-passive and exclusively passive verbs in English grammar to demonstrate its role in shaping basic intuitions about autonomy and heteronomy. The research focuses on two complementary grammatical classes: verbs that lack passive voice forms and verbs used exclusively in the passive. The hypothesis posits that these classes mark a fundamental ontological dichotomy of human experience. Non-passive verbs form the autonomous core of the person: they outline irreducible states (being, having, becoming) that cannot be conceptualized as a result of external influence. In contrast, exclusively passive verbs constitute the passive perimeter of sociality, where the individual acts as an object of external forces, institutions, and normative practices. The methodology of the study includes conceptual, comparative, and corpus analysis, a hermeneutic approach, and a componential analysis of semantic invariants. English grammatical restrictions within the category of voice create semantic taboo zones and beaten paths that structure the moral thinking of native speakers, making some ethical concepts (autonomy, personal responsibility) cognitively more accessible than others (heteronomy, duty). The research overcomes traditional lexical-centrism by identifying a specific syntactic mechanism that mediates the connection between language structure and moral consciousness. Ultimately, the rules of grammar act as an active constitutive factor of moral ontology; grammar is not a passive reflection but an active constitutive force that predetermines the boundaries of the morally acceptable, forming a "linguistic a priori" of ethical experience. The study contributes to meta-ethics by offering an operationalizable tool for testing the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the realm of morality and outlining prospects for cross-linguistic research.
Disputes about Altaic (Transeurasian) kinship make the issue of the origins of the Turkic language continuum a relevant scientific area. To address this problem, Turkology and Altaic studies use a transdisciplinary approach. The article attempts to reconstruct some features of the Proto-Turkic world by comparing monosyllabism in the Yakut, Chuvash, Tuvan, Kyrgyz, and the Turkic Ursprache languages against a comparative-historical background. The diverse methodology and transdisciplinary approach lead to the denial of the theory of Transeurasian kinship. The correlation between the worlds of the Xiongnu and the Ursprache Turks, the Proto-Turks and the slab-grave culture represents an exclusively authorial concept, making no claim to absolute truth and requiring further verification. The diversification of the Proto-Turkic population occurred in Mongolia, where evidence of linguistic diversity was found in the Turkic Ursprache. The Turkic language continuum did not arise as a result of the divergence (disintegration) of the Altaic (Transeurasian) proto-language, but as a result of the early convergence of the Proto-Turks and Caucasoid populations and their languages within the slab-grave and deer stones (kereksur) cultures. This took place during the period between the 13th–12th centuries BC and the 8th–7th centuries (or 9th–8th centuries) BC in Southern Buryatia and Mongolia, leading to the transition of the Caucasoid populations to Proto-Turkic and its subsequent divergence. Probably, these events were reflected in Chinese narratives about the relationship between the Di and Rong and the ancestors of the Xiongnu. The Proto-Turkic world is associated with the change of seasons, steppes, mountains, pastures, and abundant water bodies, as well as with periodic extreme weather events leading to livestock deaths due to a lack of food. The nomadic Proto-Turks were engaged in sewing, hewing, making bows, and producing oil, and they also had knowledge of writing and arithmetic.
Interdiscursivity remains largely understudied in new hybrid genres, e.g., in amateur film criticism. However, interdiscursivity is undoubtedly a key mechanism of film blog texts. Amateur film criticism is at the intersection of personal discourse and professional expertise. Bloggers use a diverse range of discursive strategies to build trust and engage the audience, i.e., to achieve their communicative goal. These linguistic tools and pragmatic interdiscursive functions were subjected to a linguistic and pragmatic analysis in the specific context of film blogging. The methods of discursive, pragmatic, and stylistic analyses were applied to texts retrieved from the Kinorium platform to establish ways of interaction between personal and professional discourses, which manifests itself as a system of multi-level tools and depends on the specific pragmatics. Interdiscursivity manifests itself in film blogs through the systemic interaction of personal, professional, media, and internet discourses. The main linguistic markers include a combination of emotionally evaluative vocabulary with specialized terms, stylistic devices, appeals to personal experience, and internet communication tools. From a pragmatic point of view, interdiscursivity proves to serve as a strategic tool for legitimizing subjective assessment, reducing distance from the reader, and digital adaptation. This resulting multidimensional product is both sophisticated and emotional, which makes it especially engaging and influential. Future research will include audience response to the interdiscursive variations in film blogging.
This linguacultural analysis examines the semantic content of the concept Yugra in contemporary Russian discourse. While recent advancements in corpus linguistics have enabled the design of dynamic models for language and discourse phenomena, onomastic concepts remain largely understudied. The linguacultural reconstruction of Yugra as a field structure relied on 5,503 instances extracted from 2,388 texts across various subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (including the Main, Newspaper, Poetic, Academic, Spoken, Historical, and Social Media corpora). The methodological framework integrates corpus-statistical analysis, contextual-semantic methods, and the conceptual field organization model developed by Z.D. Popova and I.A. Sternin. The distributional and semantic results were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This comprehensive approach revealed the core cognitive features of the Yugra concept and the connections between them, which demonstrated a pronounced semantic disparity. The core (90.8% of contexts) was shaped predominantly by data from the newspaper corpus, which was dominated by lexemes with commercial semantics, specifically Yugra Bank (41.35%). The near periphery (8.7% of contexts) proved to be semantically stable and defined a territorial component. The far periphery (0.4% of contexts) retained the historical, archetypal national core. Consequently, the Yugra concept has undergone a significant transformation: from a traditional ethnotoponym, it has evolved into a modern economic brand with a dual nature, merging industrial modernity with cultural archaism and hinting at the future expansion of its semantic potential.
