This article attempts to trace semantic change of the modal word „kaum“ and its meaning in German and Russian languages. Traditionally modal words being much more frequent in spoken than in written language don`t possess grammatical status. In the context this article focuses on etymology, equivalents and combinability with other particles, as well on the introduction of meanings of „kaum“ in pre-, middle- and afterfields.

This article is devoted to the cross-cultural analysis of phraseological units of biblical origin in the Russian, Spanish, Italian, French and English languages. The conducted cross-cultural analysis revealed a range of similarities and differences between phraseological units of biblical origin in given languages, showed general and culture-specific features in biblical phraseology despite the common source that affect the translation of those units from one language to another.

The article is devoted to a cognitive analysis of the frame-scenario “discreditation” in the political discourse. The material taken is Barack Obama’s speech in the final US presidential debates on October 22, 2012. As seen from the results, the frame-scenario «discreditation» can be viewed as a series of components. There are five of them: stimulus – approval – criticism – approval – conclusion. Due to conceptual analysis of the two main components, i.e. approval and criticism, it is possible to find out their dominant meanings.

The life of a hero-fighter as a linguistic and social personality is organized around hierarchically arranged value dominants, which are socially and individually determined and form his conceptual and linguistic pictures of the world. Such dominants are believed to semiotize the hero’s linguo-cultural space, consequently identifying the objectives and priorities of the society, as well as shaping the personality’s outlook.

The types of transposition and the peculiarities of their functioning in the novel “For whom the bell tolls” by E. Hemingway are analyzed in the article.

This article presents the results of a study in the field of contact variantology or World Englishes. It describes the results of the English and Japanese languages contact in Japan’s popular music culture. Phonetic, lexical and grammatical features of Japan English in J-pop and J-rock song texts are presented and analyzed. Code-mixing is examined at the levels of the text, paragraph and phrase.

The aim of the research under consideration is to figure out the cultural peculiarities of studying foreign languages in modern Russia. To achieve this aim a survey concerning the aims, reasons and ways of studying foreign languages and cultures was conducted. It was aimed at schoolchildren in Moscow, students, graduates and postgraduates, international students, visitors and trainees of higher linguistic institutions in Russia. Contrastive study of the answers given by the respondents from various world regions helped to single out the peculiarities of foreign language studies in Russia.

The article brings out the problem of Russian lyric and comedy genres being scarcely absent in France. Apart from the objective historical reasons, the problem has its roots in the difficulties of Russian humor and poetry translation and in profound world-view differences that require not only an elaborate translation of these tricky art works, but also a constant enlightening work aimed at the prospective audience.

The article deals with the issue of shortening and lengthening of the component structure of German and Russian idioms. In language corpora numerous examples of the varying lexical structure of idioms can be found. From the lexicographic point of view, the description of new variants and of differences between German and Russian quasi-equivalents appears to be most problematic.

In this paper, the ways of making the category of the tragic in German dramatic discourse are researched. Also, a problem of its pragmatic reconstruction in translation of dramatic text into Russian is attended.

This article rationalizes a lexicographic study of the cognitive concept explicators REBEL and REBELL existing in the German language and in American English. Key concept names, or verbalizators, are detected and classified according to their semantic characteristics, including those historically inherent in the words` inner forms. Finally, substantial changes in concept names` meanings are laid out based on a diachronic analysis of a number of dictionary entries.

The article deals with the question, what new information about the semantics of
German idioms can be acquired from computer-readable text-corpora. Illustrative
material is taken from the dictionary articles, which were composed by the author. The analysis of corpora data gives an opportunity to detect meanings, which have not yet been fixed in dictionaries, to reveal, what meanings are the most frequent, and to order them accordingly to their frequency, as well to consider cases of non-idiomatic or weakly idiomatic usage.