The article explores the semiotic potential of a postage stamp as a social communication tool. Despite the fact that a postage stamp is initially a utilitarian means of payment, it is capable of implementing many functions, and its pragmatics are directly related to the representation and transmission of cultural and ideological meanings, which makes the stamp an important means of forming cultural identity. Collectable practices make stamps semiotic artefacts that lose their utilitarian meaning and acquire new cultural connotations. The analysis of the series of postage stamps dedicated to the anniversaries of Alexander Pushkin, proposed in the article, illustrates the changes in cultural symbols during the period from 1937 to 2024. The specifics of the commemorative stamps show how not only the approach to depicting Pushkin himself is changing, but also the symbolic context in which they are included: from endowing Pushkin with the features of an ideal example of poetry to forming detailed personal representations. The dynamics of the ‘philatelic plot’ building around the anniversaries of Pushkin's work shows that, being a ‘strong sign’ immersed in the structure of everyday practices as a means of mass influence, the postage stamp is a powerful socio-semiotic resource that has a direct impact on the formation, transmission and representation of cultural meanings and values. The study demonstrates that in modern society, stamps are becoming not only attributes of postal correspondence, but also elements of a cultural narrative that are actively used to form and convey ideological and aesthetic messages.
A hermeneutical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust’s attempt to interpret the meaning of the Gospel word λόγος, the first three verses of the Gospel of John, and the first three verses of the book of Genesis is proposed. The analysis of these hermeneutical constructions makes it possible to relate them—as well as the phenomenon of genesis itself—to the author’s model of recursion with inversive switching. The next step is to use this model to interpret and understand the pragmatic moment as the active beginning of meaning-making and communication. The radical expansion of pragmatics extends it beyond the bounds of semiotics proper, enabling it to be conceived as a virtually boundless sphere of human action—or more broadly, of universal agency. In this capacity, the expanding sphere of effective meaning-making is no longer reducible to practices and analytical rules of working with discrete signs. This requires their methodological and terminological distinction. Accordingly, the study of extended semiosis becomes a matter of emerging semiosics, and the principles and rules of combining discrete signs into complete statements become familiar semiotics. A similar need has emerged in contemporary linguistics: the need to distinguish between the expanded use of linguistic capacities for pragmatically motivated communication—or languaging—and the more narrowly defined traditional models of text and utterance construction based on normative lexicons and formal grammars. The article contains a sketch of the main approaches to the study of verbalisation and the formation of the corresponding scientific traditions.
The article is devoted to connectives, i. e., functional words and constructions whose primary function is to express semantic relations between units of discourse. It aims to explore the pragmatic dimension of connectives, which remains largely underappreciated in linguistic pragmatics to date. Given that the concept of pragmatics has at least two distinct interpretations in linguistic research—here termed the epistemological (pragmatics as shared knowledge activated in discourse production and comprehension) and the semiotic (pragmatics as information about the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance, conveyed through linguistic means)—both perspectives are addressed. The introductory section justifies the use of the term konnektor (the Russian equivalent of connective), a relatively recent addition to Russian linguistic terminology, arguing for its advantages over closely related terms. This section also demonstrates the formal diversity of connectives. Section 2, the main body of the article, consists of two parts. In the first (2.1), it is argued that pragmatics, in its epistemological interpretation, functions as a factor that specifies or refines the general semantic relation expressed by the connective. In the second part (2.2), the focus shifts to the semiotic interpretation, where we identify pragmatic components within the linguistic meaning of connectives. Based on the analysis of several representative cases, the article concludes that, in addition to their primary function of marking semantic relations within discourse, some connectives also perform a secondary function: conveying pragmatic information about the speaker’s attitude toward the propositional content of the connected units.
The article is devoted to the semantic evolution of the evaluative adjectives ‘horoshii’ and ‘plohoi’ (‘good’ and ‘bad’) in the early Soviet language. Through the use of party documents, propaganda slogans, letters to the government and literary texts of the 1920—1930s, the article reveals how these words turned into universal markers reflecting conformity to new social and political standards. The first part of the article analyzes the role of the adjective ‘good’ as a universal rhetorical tool used to create an optimistic image of socialist reality. This word gradually loses its subjective evaluative value, turning into a standard ideological stamp symbolizing positivity and conformity to socialist norms. The second section discusses the reinterpretation of the concept of a good person and the emergence of the opposition between a good person and a good communist, where the former remains the bearer of personal virtues and the latter — the embodiment of socialist ideals. The concept of a true person is seen as a compromise between these categories. The third section is devoted to the metaphorical concepts of strength, resilience, and reliability, which become central to the description of Soviet man and social structures. These characteristics, formed on the basis of technical metaphors, reflect the industrial and collectivist spirit of the era. The methodology includes discourse analysis and semantic research, which make it possible to examine how language, in shaping normative concepts, becomes a crucial instrument of ideological influence by consolidating socialist values through the semantic transformation of everyday language.
The paper discusses the latest results of the study of pragmalinguistic and proper linguistic mechanisms for expressing implicit evaluativeness of words and expressions of the Russian language in their discursive implementation. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the pragmatics of the induced evaluativeness in the context of the initially non-evaluative event verb ‘sovershit’sya’ in comparison with the previously considered quasisynonymous lexeme ‘svershit’sya’. The author's methodology of complex (contentive and quantitative) corpus-discourse analysis is used. The source of language material is modern domestic media discourse. The direct material of the study is the contexts extracted from the newspaper corpora of the Russian National Corpus. At the preliminary, empirical level of the study, according to the dictionary data, it was found that the meanings of the verbs ‘sovershit’sya’ and ‘svershit’sya’ cannot be distinguished, while the analysis of a large block of corpus data showed significant semantic and stylistic discrepancies between these lexemes. The lexeme ‘sovershit’sya’ mainly denotes standard, everyday situations. The lexeme ‘svershit’sya’, in turn, tends to denote situations that have some significance for the conceptualizer — spiritual, social, psychological, moral, etc., both with a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ sign. It has also been established that in the aspect of “pragmatics of induced evaluation”, according to the data of quantitative analysis, the verb ‘sovershit’sya’ refers to a neutrally evaluated fact, event or phenomenon, while the verb ‘svershit’sya’ clearly tends to the positive-evaluative attitude of the speaker to the depicted. It is concluded that the method of corpus-discursive analysis of induced evaluativeness tested in the work has significant potential for research objectification of fairly subtle semantic differences between words close in meaning, as well as for recording intuitively felt, but not recorded by dictionaries, evaluativeness, which is implied by the immediate or further contextual environment of the analyzed word or expression.
