The article deals with the linguistically relevant trends of knowledge changes in the minds of our contemporaries taking into consideration the dominant characteristics of our era - the information technology revolution and postmodern carnival-play reflection of reality. It is shown that sensitive knowledge undergoes the least transformation, the knowledge based on common sense is often changed, the rational knowledge keeps its value for professionals and is greatly simplified in popular scientific discourse, which merges with the media discourse and is aimed at entertainment of wide audience.

There is considered the contrast of the ideas in the texts of the modern Russian free verse. There is stated that the typical semantic oppositions in the free verse are the contrast of the original and the apparent, the free and the coherent, the real and the imaginary, the customary and the unexpected, the divine and the humane, the past / future and the present, the ephemeral and the constant, that has the right for a word and bears responsibility for what has been said.

Discourse is presented in a three-dimensional model of its description including topic which deals with its contents, format which comprises the communicative situation, and mode which expresses its emotional and stylistic tone. The topic of a discourse is a starting point of its linguistic analysis and it deals with the text as a material object of communication, the format includes basic components of a communicative situation - its participants, objectives, values, time and space, strategies, genres and conversational formulas, and the mode is determined by culturally bound personal predispositions of communicative situation participants who take part in certain types of social actions via certain communicative channels.

The article deals with “Fragments of Apocryphal Gospel” by J.L. Borges. The text is viewed as a post-modernist commentary to the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus Christ. Main axiological orienting points of the text are singled out and commented upon - on the one hand, emphasizing the value of this life on the earth and stoic indifference to the vicissitude of fate, and on the other hand, accentuation of absurdity of being and conventionality of any evaluation.

The article deals with a linguistic personality understood as a generalized image of a person representing cultural values, cognitive and communicative dispositions and behavioral reactions. A structure of a linguistic personality and its tentative types are discussed.