Cognition, Communication, Discourse

Paratexts as an act for resistance: Mykola Zerov and Russian translations of the Ukrainian canoniсal poetry

Oryslava Bryska — 2025-12-24

Paratexts that accompany translations are of great importance from the historical perspective as they reveal certain factors that influenced the translation presentation and perception. Their importance is even more enhanced when the original texts are of national and cultural significance. The problem acquires a set of additional variables when texts are translated into the dominant culture. The paratexts analyzed in the research are exemplary in terms of their methodology developed with the decolonizing perspective in mind in the 30s of the 20th century in Ukraine and pertain the legacy of the national Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko being translated into Russian, the language of the long-term colonizer of the Ukrainian lands upon that time. The colonial status of the Ukrainian literature as translated into Russian enhances the importance of paratexts as it was a way of steering the perception of translation which was deprived of proper objective presentation or manipulation. Authored by the leading theoretician of translation and literary studies scholar in Ukraine of the time, Mykola Zerov, the paratexts trace which colonizer’s goals prevailed at which period, how the practice was implemented, and if there was a place for genuine appreciation of the genius of a poet who is a representative of the subjugated nation. The research aims to trace the specific elements of such translation paratexts relying upon the elements of colonial translation theory and sociological approach to translation.

Metaphern in deutschen und spanischen Medien zu Beginn des Ukrainekrieges: Eine kontrastive Analyse

María Jesús López Sixto — 2025-12-25

This article examines the use of 21 German and 22 Spanish metaphorical constructions in media discourse during the initial phase of the war in Ukraine. The study investigates which creative and innovative metaphors shaped public communication, which dimensions of the conflict they highlighted, and how their pragmatic and semantic functions operated across two linguistic and cultural contexts. The analysis draws on corpora of media texts and political statements collected from major German and Spanish online newspapers. Methodologically, the research is informed by cognitive and pragmatic approaches, acknowledging that metaphors not only reflect conceptual structures but also function as persuasive and emotive devices in political communication. By simplifying complex realities, metaphors guide interpretation, evoke emotions, and influence collective attitudes toward war, responsibility, and solidarity. Results show that German discourse frequently emphasizes national debates about political hesitation, historical responsibility, and the economic impact of the conflict, while Spanish discourse places greater weight on the European dimension and the framing of political actors. Despite these differences, both media contexts converge in portraying Russia as a fundamental threat and in legitimizing support for Ukraine through humanitarian assistance, military aid, and solidarity discourses. On a structural level, the study highlights how German often relies on compound nouns to condense meaning into compact lexical units, whereas Spanish tends to favor extended metaphorical expressions at the phrase or sentence level. In both cases, nouns play a dominant role in compressing information and achieving communicative precision. The article concludes that metaphors serve not only cognitive but also persuasive, emotional, and argumentative functions, making them powerful tools in shaping public opinion, constructing political narratives, and steering processes of social cognition in times of conflict.

Kotsiubynskyi vs Conrad: Impressionistic crossroads

Oksana Molchko — 2025-12-25

This article presents a comparative study of Ukrainian and English literary Impressionism through the works of Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi’s Fata Morgana and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Drawing on the literary theory of Impressionism and the principles of cross-cultural (comparative) literary studies, the research investigates how writers from distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds employ impressionistic techniques to convey psychological depth, sensory perception, and moral complexity. The study explores how the key traits of literary Impressionism – subjectivity, fragmentation, and vivid sensory imagery – manifest within diverse historical, ideological, and aesthetic contexts shaped by empire, national identity, and modernist thought.

Particular attention is devoted to the role of translation as an intermediary between languages and artistic systems. Comparative analysis of Ukrainian-English and English-Ukrainian translations reveals how impressionistic nuances are maintained, altered, or reinterpreted, shedding light on the challenges of preserving mood, rhythm, and atmosphere across cultural borders. Through close textual and discourse analysis, the study identifies both convergences and divergences in the ways Kotsiubynskyi and Conrad construct imagery, interiority, and representations of colonial or peripheral experience.

Ultimately, the paper positions Impressionism as a transnational aesthetic mode that transcends national and linguistic frontiers, linking Ukrainian and English modernisms through shared concerns with perception, consciousness, and artistic form. This research contributes a new intercultural perspective on literary Impressionism and its capacity to articulate the complexity of human experience in a global context.

Intertextual meme “One does not simply”: conceptual blending diagrams

Olena Nefyodova — 2025-12-25

The article aims to expand the analytical and explanatory potential of the theory of intertextuality by applying the principles and methodology of cognitive-discursive linguistics to take into account the cognitive mechanisms of establishing intertextual relations in the formation of intertextually active multimodal texts and their life cycle. The study attempts to transcend the exclusively descriptive approach to text analysis and instead to explore the intertextually active multimodal meme-image macros “One does not simply”, to consider the mechanisms of conceptual integration and their effects in the processes of the meme’s emergence, intertextual instantiation, growth, decline and decay, and to elicit and analyse the verbal/nonverbal structures, manifesting such processes of meaning production. To achieve the set goal, the paper proposes and tests a procedure for comprehensive analysis of a multimodal meme-image macro at all the stages of its life cycle, which involves: 1) discovering the lingual and extralingual context of the meme formation; 2) identifying the meme’s typological structural-semantic, multimedia, and other features and prototyping them; 3) analyzing cognitive operations and conceptual integration mechanisms that form the prototypical structural-semantic parameters of the meme and the processes of meaning formation and intertextual bonding; 4) investigating the transformations of the identified prototypical parameters at all the life cycle stages. The application of the proposed methodology for analysing the life cycle of the meme-image macro “One does not simply” revealed the multi-stage nature of the conceptual integration process, leading to the emergence of the meme, the emergence of meaning from direct and reverse mapping of integrated features, the elaboration of the resulting integrative structure due to snowcloning and other transformations, and the meme’s loss of its multimodality and precedent potential at the final stage of its life cycle. The analysis demonstrated that the verbal and non-verbal components of the image macro’s structure are not arbitrary: they reflect the core processes of conceptual integration and they are adapted to intertextual existence.

'That’s depressing, lol': Humor markers in the self-addressed discourse of futureme letters

Valeriia Nikolaienko — 2025-12-25

This article examines humor as a cognitive and pragmatic resource in asynchronous self-addressed digital discourse, focusing on publicly available letters written on the FutureMe.org platform. A corpus of 3,426 English-language letters sent by users to their future selves was compiled and searched for four widely used humor markers, lol, haha, hehe, and lmao (along with their spelling variants). The resulting 652 concordances were manually annotated to determine whether these markers generally index humorous intent or specifically signal amusement at the communicative incongruence inherent in addressing a future self. Drawing on incongruity-based theories of humor, the study conceptualizes the FutureMe letter as a genre that simultaneously presupposes an addressee and challenges the epistemic conditions typical for epistolary communication. The results indicate that 11.7% of all humor-marker occurrences explicitly accompany reflections on the paradoxical status of the addressee (being both Self and Other), revealing humor’s role in managing conceptual fuzziness. It has also been found that lol, haha and lmao signal humorous effect (laughter) more often than hehe. Qualitative analysis further discusses three primary functions of humor markers: (i) indexing amusement at the strange, playful incongruity of writing to oneself across time; (ii) signaling or reinforcing a joke; and (iii) mitigating excessively grave, emotional, or face-threatening content. The findings suggest that humor in these letters serves less as a reaction to situationally humorous content and more as a pragmatic device for stance adjustment under atypical communicative conditions. By foregrounding humor’s role in resolving genre-based and epistemic incongruities, the article contributes to research on digital communication, humor pragmatics, and stance in self-addressed discourse.

One man’s war: Person-marking and geopolitical positioning in Viktor Orbán’s speeches (2022–2025).

Lilla Petronella Szabó — 2025-12-25

Following Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, the European Union and NATO largely reached a consensus on supporting Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. However, Hungary’s government opted for a different approach, consistently obstructing decision-making processes. This raises the question how Hungary’s leaders positioned the country amid these disagreements during the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. This paper explores the rhetoric of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the primary spokesperson for the Hungarian government, to unravel how he portrays his leadership and the various group dynamics involving Hungary and its people. Utilizing the experiential view of person-marking and corpus linguistic methods, we analyzed four of his annual speeches from 2022 to 2025, focusing on first-person singular and plural, as well as third-person plural references. The use of the first person indicates whether the speaker emphasizes their own viewpoint in their rhetoric. First- and third-person plural references shed light on different in-group and out-group dynamics. Our research indicates that the Prime Minister increasingly expressed his personal views in his addresses, while distancing Hungary from its usual alliances and crafting a narrative centered on “foreign adversaries.” These trends illustrate how political figures can manipulate alliance structures in their discourse and contribute to democratic backslide by normalizing narratives of external threats.

Narrative of EU heritage diplomacy in the CLIL classroom: A cognitive linguistic approach

Svitlana Zhabotynska — 2025-12-25

Done from the standpoint of applied linguistics, this study demonstrates convergence of ideas and findings served by political narratology, cognitive linguistics, and CLIL methodology (Content and Language Integrated Learning), where the foreign language of instruction is English. The study shows how the topic “European Union (EU) heritage diplomacy”, important for today’s narrative space of European politics, can be taught in the CLIL classroom that uses cognitive ontologies as a scaffolding technique. The development of cognitive ontologies proposed in this enquiry grounds on the algorithmic ‘modelling grammar’ of basic propositional schemas (BPSs) defined in Semantics of Lingual Networks (Zhabotynska, 2019) – a cognitive linguistic conception focused on structuring information delivered with language. As a scaffolding device for arranging the topic “EU heritage diplomacy” taught to students of International Relations, a cognitive ontology provides this topic’s systematization and narrative cohesion, thus contributing to students’ understanding of WHAT to say. Besides, an ontological arrangement of the topic supplies rationale behind its division into educational modules and their constituents. A cognitive ontology also becomes the means for arranging phrasal sets of the authentic English expressions featuring the topic, thus facilitating acquisition of the language and enhancing students’ ‘HOW to say’ proficiency. The study argues that cognitive ontologies are not only an efficient tool of teaching, but also a useful instrument for developing students’ ability to adequately process professionally relevant content, and create coherent and cohesive narratives of this content – the skills that the modern society, immersed in information and communication flows, badly needs.