Some linguistic mechanisms of impact on audience by formation of mass consciousness stereotypes in respect of certain countries, events, phenomena of public and political life, as well as individuals, used in the British, American and Russian mass media, mainly, in texts of information messages, are considered in the article.
The article is devoted to a research of functional characteristics of the English and Russian media texts about the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Modern English and Russian media texts about the XXII Olympic Winter Games act as a research object. Functional classification of media texts is described; substantial features of the English and Russian media texts about the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics are defined. Functional features of the Russian and English media texts about the 2014 Winter Olympics are established
The paper presents results of charcoal and macrofossil analysis of the cremation burial grounds of the Imenkovo culture that occupied the Middle Volga region in 400—650 CE. We analyzed assemblages from four necropolises: Bogorodski, Maklasheevka 4, Komarovka and a burial ground from Zhigulevsk 2 site. Charred remains were recorded at the bottom of burials, among cremated bones or in the in-fill of graves and mortuary vessels. The assemblages contained charcoal, caryopses and stems of millet and cereals, seeds and stems of grasses and weeds, and shoots of thorny shrubs. The size of the charcoal pieces did not exceed 3 cm, being much smaller in most burials. The species composition of charcoal from cremations indicates that all locally-available woody taxa were used for the funeral pyre, instead of choosing certain types of trees for ritual purposes. Thus, the composition of the cremation fuel reflected the vegetation composition of the encasing landscape. Dominant charred taxa in the Imenkovo cremations were Tilia and Betula (linden and birch), the typical components of the "slash-and-burn landscape" of the Middle Volga region during this period. Despite the fact that all the burial grounds were located at the higher grounds in the landscape, the presence of riverine taxa — Alnus, Salix, and Ulmus (willow, alder and elm) and abundance of charred herbaceous remains in the charcoal spectra points at floodplains or mouths of gullies as a probable location of cremation platforms. An important detail of the funeral rite, revealed by the research, is placing unhulled millet, soaked and germinated before cremation, into the funeral pyre.