Res Humanitariae

The article deals with communicative failures of journalists in “YouTube” celebrity video interviews in the Ukrainian and German linguacultures from the point of view of social interaction and the theory of speech genres at all structural levels of the communicative genre construction, establishing common and distinctive features in both linguacultures. The analysis made it possible to conclude that behind a language (speech) failure there is a violation caused by a journalist, a respondent, or an external noise.

This article discusses maritime and other navigation-related terms proposed by V. Pakalniškis in his book The Explanation of Navigation Terms (2005). Terms proposed as substitutes to the words of foreign origin but not mentioned in other publications of this field have been researched. The composition and correct usage of these substitutes are analyzed, their use in other highly popular sources have been researched, and in cases of their use, the meanings are compared with other publications. This article determines which maritime terms can be considered as neologisms proposed by V. Pakalniškis and partially discusses the (un)suitability of these proposed terms.

The article reviews tombstone inscriptions of Klaipėda Region cemeteries of the late 19th to mid-20th c. from a linguistic viewpoint. The inscriptions are German or Lithuanian, less frequently bilingual (in German and Lithuanian on the same tombstone). The greatest attention is paid to the Lithuanian inscriptions, with the focus on their vocabulary and morphology. Moreover, the principal linguistic characteristics of personal names are discussed.

Some of the words used in these discourses about multiculturalism, and everyday multicultural practice, such as “culture”, “ethnicity”, and “identity”, are ubiquitous and figure in almost every argument about multiculturalism, or discussion about multicultural practice. What I am going to argue is that, in popular and some scholarly discourses, these words and concepts may be used in ways that may be completely incompatible with our anthropological understandings of them. I am going to focus on three interrelated problems: ethnocentrism, essentialism, and primordialism.