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This article aims to analyze changes in wealth inequality in the modern Euro-American civilization (EAC). The research object includes the USA, Western Europe, Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia. A tool for measuring and comparing wealth inequality is through statistical deciles: the top 10% (including the top 1%), the middle 40%, and the bottom 50% of the population. The time points used for diachronic analysis are: 1995 and 2021. The data source is the World Inequality Database. The results of this study show that in different parts of the modern EAC, there are different trends of changes in wealth inequality: from rapid concentrating to deconcentrating. The USA and Russia are vivid examples of similar (rapidly increasing) wealth inequality, with a very strong wealth concentration, although the average per adult national wealth in the USA is 4-5 times higher than in Russia. Latvia and Ukraine represent an intermediate option between Western Europe and the USA / Russia, which differ from each other in the cultural dimensions of Hofstede. The authors see the multipolarity of the modern EAC, split into the original, European, civilization and two peripheral ones - American and Russian, which are similar in terms of wealth inequality in society, but different in cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing part of studies on English for academic purpose explores how English is used in non-Anglophone contexts. This article focuses on the insufficiently studied context of Russia, where English has been used as a language of scientific publications only since the last decade. The paper explores hedging devices in Russian authors' research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the use of these linguistic means. Exploring categories of hedges and suggesting reasons for diachronic changes in their use are other research questions. It is assumed their distribution could change over time. The improved English proficiency of Russian academic writers, the weakening intrusion of the national criteria of good writing and greater awareness of the Anglophone academic writing norms due to the need to publish internationally have influenced metadiscourse patterns in Russian-authored academic prose. The study is based on a corpus of 120 research article abstracts from the field of linguistics published in two Russian journals in 2010-2021. The theoretical framework followed here is Hyland's (2018) taxonomy of hedges, which offers a pragmatically-grounded method for analyzing hedging in academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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