The death of unarmed black male George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, May 25, 2020, has given momentum to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement whose activists rallied in different parts of the world to remove or deface monuments to historic figures associated with racism, slavery, and colonialism. These social practices of toppling statues have a discursive value and, since they are meant to communicate a message to the broader society, these actions are incorporated into a semiotic system. This study examines signs and, therefore, the system of representations involved in toppling statues performed by BLM activists and documented in photos. The research employs a critical approach to semiotics based on Roland Barthes' (1964) semiotic model of levels of signification. However, for a comprehensive analytical understanding, the study also makes use of a multidisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis CDA approach which provides a systematic method to examine and expose power relations, inequality, dominance, and oppression in social practices. Besides its general analytical framework, the integrated CDA approach combines Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional analytical approach, which presupposes examining text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice, with Reisigl and Wodak's (2001, 2017) Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA), which investigates ideology and racism within their socio-cultural and historic context. The analysis of the images reveals a common thematic structure and encoded messages produced in order to change the cultural and social norms of the USA national discourse generated and cultivated within a specific ideological and historical context. These social actions consist of signs that make up a coherent communicative system which provides BLM activists with instruments in the struggle over the memory of slavery, white supremacy and oppression of the past for the rights of the black minority in the present in a better society of racial equality, human rights, and liberation.

Dramatic changes in political, economic, cultural, scientific, and technological spheres, which have taken place in recent decades, have caused noticeable alterations in different societal domains, including education. Through the prism of the modern educational paradigm that mainly focuses on meeting the needs of human beings, nowadays, a special place is occupied by ICTs and their integration into the educational process. The present research is devoted to both theoretical evidence and practical implementation of automated writing evaluation (AWE) tool “Write and Improve” into language learning at a higher educational establishment. We use experimental method titled case study, which allows finding out ways to incorporate the software mentioned above into EFL. First and foremost, the author analyses fundamental and contemporary studies in the realm of ICT integration into language teaching, learning, and assessment. Special attention is paid to AWE as cutting-edge software, which utilizes artificial intelligence to assess students’ writing. The data under investigation indicate that using AWE computer-assisted programs facilitates students’ management and increases motivation for writing and revision. The article sets a goal to demonstrate that “Write and Improve” is an example of innovative technology to enhance writing as an essential academic competency. Based on profound theoretical substantiations, the author conducts the experiment to test the research hypothesis in the case study. Within the framework of the article's written tasks, university students who study English as their major subject at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv have been chosen. The attempted investigation proved “Write and Improve” to be highly effective among language learners, thus worth being introduced not only into teaching and learning but also assessment.

TikTok is a social network that has provided its users with a unique combination of communicative tools and, as a result, has laid the foundation for a new communication context for self-expression and identity presentation. The article examines how TikTokers' discourse, with the help of the app's technology, uses language means and other semiotic systems to present their self, to construct their online identities and to attract like-minded audiences. The study is based on 45 TikTok videos uploaded by different bloggers who were selected with the help of continuous sampling. The videos are analyzed by applying Critical Discourse Analysis and, in particular, Multimodal Discourse Analysis as frameworks for critical examination of verbal and nonverbal (images, soundtracks, clothes, etc.) means as well as contextual and intertextual structures of the TikTokers' texts aimed at online self-expression and identify-presentation. The research reveals that the TikTokers avail themselves with syntactic patterns typical of self-presentation in order to assert their preferred selves and construct their identities by purposefully breaking away from conventional master identities, e.g., they claim either to be sex-neutral, or to be able to combine stereotypically incompatible identities, or to deny having any identity at all. To reflect on their selves and convey their message to the audience, the TikTokers use texts that feature intertextuality and multimodality. The merge of multimodal semiotic means helps the bloggers to create a complex of techno-semio-linguistic materiality typical of social media. The bloggers succeed in combining these diverse means so as to develop the intended meaning, to mediate their identities to their audience and, finally, to create their own communities rallied around the constructed identities.

The present article deals with an increasing number of words which have recently appeared in the English language due to the drastic changes in social, political, economic realms as well as science and technology. Constant technological and scientific progress as surely as active development of cultural, spiritual and everyday spheres of life may be a powerful stimulus for the continual enrichment of English lexicon. The English language is monthly enriched by new lexical units which are introduced into official dictionaries and thesauri in order to extend its vocabulary. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide comprehensive linguistic research of innovative food-related lexical units, collocations, expressions and notions as well as to observe productive word-building patterns used for coining new words. Firstly, we examine fundamental works on the subject of neology, neologisms and their wordformation types as a linguistic phenomenon. Secondly, the focus of attention is on structure and semantics of food-related coinages which have recently come into use. Moreover, we concentrate on blending as the most frequently occurring word-formation type used to create neologisms in the sphere of gastronomy and related domains. In addition, various types of lexical blends are discussed as well as their high degree of productivity. Finally, we make conclusions and suggestions for further linguistic investigations.

The research applies the relationship strategies and the image repair strategies frameworks to study and compare celebrities and microcelebrities’ communicative activity on social media during the lockdown in the USA and the UK in spring, 2020. For celebrities, the sample collected on social media in March – April, 2020, reveals qualitative changes: in the quarantine, first-rank celebrities attempted to reduce the assumed gap between themselves and their fans by using the strategies typically associated with microcelebrities, namely openness, positivity, task sharing, and assurance. If applied inappropriately, these strategies damaged the celebrities’ image and the famous chose either to take corrective actions or to ignore the communication failure. The microcelebrities’ messages during the lockdown did not show any qualitative shift: they held on to their typical openness, assurance and task sharing relationship maintenance strategies. Yet, the posts, where some microcelebrities, pursuing the openness strategy, sincerely reported their neglect of the quarantine restrictions, were more destructive to their image than similar posts from celebrities. The negative feedback affected microcelebrities communication on social media quantitatively and qualitatively: the number of messages dropped and the bloggers employed an extensive set of strategies to repair their image.   Received: 3 June 2021 / Accepted: 26 July 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021