The present paper is a comparative corpus study of the verbal expression of emotional etiquette in American English and Russian. The study is conducted against the backdrop of certain assumptions regarding the cross-cultural centrality and marginality of emotions as formulated in the current research on cross-cultural pragmatics. The paper employs corpus-based methods to test the frequencies of the linguistic expression of different types of emotions in Russian and American English as encountered in diagnostic contexts of first-person reporting. Contrary to many currently accepted theories, the present study demonstrates no absolute prevalence of positive or ethical over negative or non-ethical emotions in Russian or American English. It also disproves certain more specific claims (the predominance of ‘pity’ in Russian), while confirming others (prominence of ‘shame’ in Russian). Certain tendencies in emotional etiquette lean toward cross-cultural universality (e.g., ‘gratitude’ as the most frequently expressed emotion), while others differ. Overall, Russian speakers tend to report more passive negative emotions (‘fear’), while English speakers prefer reporting active negative emotions (‘anger’). Russian speakers are more “self-deprecating” than English speakers, as they favor expressing ‘shame’ over ‘pride.’ At the same time, they show less empathy with the addressee, reporting more ‘contempt’-like and less ‘pity’-like emotions. The results obtained in this study can be useful for understanding and formulating culturally specific pragmatic peculiarities and hence preferred conversational strategies in the two languages.

This paper aims at a linguistic description and evaluation of the myth of the Russian soul. This myth is a prominent cultural stereotype centered on mental, emotional, and spiritual concepts. The specific goal of this paper is to project the linguistic "image" of the Russian soul, which consists mainly of emotions, onto the corresponding cultural myth which exists in Russian literature and philosophy, as well as in Russian folk belief. Such a superimposition should reveal whether linguistic evidence does in fact support the Russian soul myth. To test the linguistic specificity of Russian emotions, they are contrasted to their English-language counterparts. The English language material is based on American English since all my informants were American. Literary sources and corpora were also used. The task at hand requires a new framework for a cross-linguistic study of emotions and such a framework is proposed. As distinct from traditional word-to-word contrastive analysis, the proposed approach involves comparing entire emotion "clusters," i.e. all linguistic means of expressing a particular type of emotion in a given language. The paper also touches upon certain related fields of emotion studies, namely neuropsychology and physiology, as they provide valuable insight into the similarities and differences between the linguistic model of emotions and their scientific counterparts. These fields also provide explanations for the similarity and variation in conceptions of emotions as they are attested across different languages and cultures.

The paper is devoted to one type of Russian distributive constructions with two interrogative pronouns, such as kto kuda lit. “who where”, kto o čëm lit. “who about what”, kogda kak lit. “when how”, which bear the meaning ‘diff erent Xs are characterized by diff erent Ys’. We discovered that the constructions without a predicate in the right context form a special type, which diff ers both from indirect distributive questions and quasi-relatives in their semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, and communicative properties. Based on corpus data, we show their historical development and modern usage, as well as describe the most frequent lexical variables which fi ll the construction. The conclusion is that the frequency, syntactic features, and degree of idiomatization have their own semantic, communicative, and pragmatic grounds.

This paper presents a corpus study of pragmatic factors involved in interpreting potentially ambiguous sentences with negation and universal quantifiers, as demonstrated by the Russian sentence Oni ne uspejut vsjo eto sdelat’ ‘They won’t have time to do all this.’ Ambiguity in such sentences results from potential differences in scope assignment. If negation scopes over the quantifier, we get the interpretation of partial negation: ‘They will manage to do some of these things, but not everything.’ If negation scopes over the verb, we get total negation: ‘They won’t manage to do anything.’ This study is based on Russian and English data extracted from a variety of corpora. We demonstrate that while syntactic conditions where scope ambiguity is possible are different for Russian and English, in situations when both languages allow it, speakers rely on the same pragmatic mechanisms for disambiguation that are based on Gricean cooperation principle and shared background knowledge. Disambiguation is facilitated by lexical markers, different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings, and similar in Russian and English. We show that the interpretation of the quantifier is pragmatically different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings (emphatic in the former case and quantificational in the latter), and lexical markers of each reading are semantically and pragmatically consistent with this difference. Namely, verb-negated readings occur primarily in the context of demonstrative pronouns in their pragmaticalized meaning of negative assessment and negatively connoted nouns, while quantifier-negated readings occur in the context of verbs with quantitative semantics and quantitative implicatures that consolidate the interpretation of quantification.

No abstract