The article under consideration is aimed at cross-cultural quantified associative mapping of the universal concept “happiness” and shaping the hierarchy of its cornerstone axiological constituents as perceived by Russian, French and English linguosocieties within the framework of the global pandemic reality. “Happiness” has been subject to transdisciplinary investigation since ancient times due to its dynamic character and ambiguity. The concept of “happiness”, although psychologically ingrained and biologically predetermined, can change significantly based on different outer and inner factors. It demonstrates an undeniable potential for multiple perceptions, various patterns of ethnic-specific and highly personalized verbalization, requiring unification and analysis of different sociocultural stimuli that trigger off this or that row of associations. The authors provide keen insight into the semantics of the concept and its static lexicographic axiological paradigm in the Russian, French and English languages. Three associative surveys were carried out through Google-forms to estimate the degree at which the “static projection” of “happiness” is relevant nowadays in pandemic-shaken societies as well as collect free associations, manually contrast the data and establish parallels and peculiarities within up-to-date Russian, French and English (American) visions of “happiness”. The survey results testify to the fact that “health”, “family”, “peace” and “freedom” are universally recognized constituents of “happiness” while certain elements prove to be ethnic-specific and arise due to concrete social circumstances.

The article considers sports commentaries in French, analyses the lexical and syntactic features of French sports commentators' spontaneous speech. Sports discourse is defined as a type of communication between participants of sports activities aimed at achieving communicative goals. The use of tropes in sports commentary allows making the speech of a sports journalist more expressive, adds details to the depiction and conveys evaluative and emotionally expressive meanings. This function is performed primarily by metaphors and comparisons that exist in the form of metaphorical terms, stable metaphorical comparisons and original (occasional) metaphors. The detailed occasional military metaphors are of particular interest. The metaphorical use of military vocabulary allows sports journalists to convey the drama of the competition. Another important feature of sports discourse is the use of slang. The paper studies jargon expressions based on proper names, which make up a special group of football vocabulary. Descriptive, more explanatory translation is often required to render such notions into Russian. In terms of syntax, sports commentators' spontaneous speech reveals such characteristic features as agrammatism, excessive use of language elements, use of sentences with an abbreviated syntactic structure. The stylistic and syntactic figures are used to solve several problems: they increase the expressiveness of speech, contribute to a more compact presentation of information.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.