Human communication has been a relevant area of social research for last 50 years. It attracts the attention of psychologists, sociologists, culturologists, and, of course, linguists. The theory of verbal influence, which arose at the intersection of argumentation, rhetoric, and pragmatics, is now at the stage of forming its own terminological research vocabulary, as is evidenced by the lack of an elaborate system of tactics and strategies. The article highlights leading approaches to this problem within the framework of various scientific disciplines. It is worth mentioning that special contribution to the development of persuasion theory was made by marketers, by specialists in behavioral economics, by social psychologists and psychotherapists, that is, scholars and practitioners who did not study linguistic problems properly. The proposed conclusions make it possible to use theoretical achievements of related humanitarian disciplines to enrich the linguistic theory of persuasion.

This paper describes personal reasoning peculiarities of Russian undergraduate students viewed through the prism of their culture and their psycho-typical characteristics. The experimental study showed specificity of argument formation in the students’ reasoning about their cultural values. Our experiment identified the respondents’ poles within the cognitive style ‘abstract / concrete conceptualization’ based on their verbalization of the primary values. Four levels of concept abstraction were detected and proved by the students’ verbal manifestations: the resulting students’ texts showed remarkable differences between the poles concerning preferences of argument exposition, both in its construction schemes and in the choice of components of the arguments. We thus state that the degree of variability of the students’ value assessment correlates with the degree of formation of the mechanism of differentiation in value orientations. Our recommendations for teaching reasoning concern: linguistically based principles of student cognitive differentiation which minimize distractive factors; choice of teaching tasks depending on the student specific conceptualization pole; and ways of activating differentiation and integration operations in reasoning. In a broader context of education, students’ individual peculiarities and cognitive preferences should be focused on training which stimulate the students’ learning interest.

The article provides a survey of theoretical approaches to describing conceptual and structural organization of terminology and to identifying the essence of the “term” notion. The authors briefly tackle relevant problems of terminology and identify the causes, which complicate their solution. The paper analyses the reasons for the absence of a universal definition of the multi-aspect and multi-functional notion “term” in the modern terminology science. The authors formulate and justify the problems, which make it difficult to classify terms, to separate terms from different terminological fields and to perform an adequate and equivalent translation of terms. The paper considers the following problems: “terminological field” border, differentiation of terms and nomens and affiliation of linguistic units to professional vocabulary considering the fact that these linguistic units either belong or do not belong to a certain terminological system. Finally, the authors formulate certain issues requiring immediate attention.