The paper attempts to demonstrate that the structure of language as an objective and ideal phenomenon is a hypothesis embodied in different models which depends upon the method applied to linguistic analysis.

The article shows that the basis of the methodological conception of Linguistics of the 21st century can be built on a creatively rethought linguistic conception of W. von Humboldt. In this approach the peculiarity of the device in any language should be considered as a set of features which is caused by typical communicative needs of the linguistic community and depends on its size, the degree of homogeneity and continuous or intermittent nature of communication between its members.

The article discusses certain signs of the methodological crisis in linguistics such as multiplication of the number of aspectizing concepts and those concepts’ claim to methodological leadership. The paper also contains a detailed survey of theoretical tenets of synergetics, which are compared with the foundations of G. P. Melnikov’s systemic linguistics.

The paper aims to outline some possible solutions for the elimination of chaos in the methodology and terminology of cognitive linguistics (mostly in Slavic area). It analyzes contradictions in the basic terminology of cognitive linguistic as well as the reasons why certain scholars criticize cognitive linguistics. A brief overview of the actual situation in Slavic cognitive linguistics is provided.

The authors investigate some theoretical opportunities to assure orderliness in method formulation, which is necessary for the improvement of scientific validity of forensic linguistic findings. The research considers the important issues of application of latest advances in linguistic methodology in expertise activities of a linguist.

In certain “sublanguages” (communication areas, functional styles, speech genres, etc.) grammar exhibits some variation. The differences concern the use of certain parts of speech, syntactic models, types of connections between words, kinds of function words, the frequency of grammemes (case, tense, mood, etc.), the realization of certain potential forms, etc. These are manifestations of the discursive conditionality of grammar.

It is proposed that discourse analysis be carried out according to the scheme: 1) identification and interpretation of discourse-generating domains as the intentional clusters of speech-thoughts – 2) identification of themes and sub-themes of the text – 3) fixing keywords that objectify discourse-generating domains – 4) cognitive and semantic analysis of discourse-generating domains. The main vector of discourse analysis is directed from understanding the main ideas expressed by the author, literary images, narrative strategies which are created and used by him, his codes and style – up to comprehending the depth of the author’s intent.

The article builds on the method of determining the semantics of utterance, which was applied in practice when studying the meaning of utterances in religious language. The method is based on the principal idea of the existence of different subjects within one speaker put forward by the French school of discourse. The study technique consists in dividing the whole syntactic sequence into constituents – assertive and preassertive – and further building up a number of preassertive paraphrases. The preassertive paraphrase about which the assertive constituent is true is regarded as the utterance of the second subject, determining the current discourse and thus revealing the capacity of the language speaker to produce certain utterances in some communication area.

The article compares the university directives issued in the 1970–1980’s and in the second decade of the 21st century. A pilot study allows presenting the discourse as a communicative as well as a socio-political phenomenon. Assuming that discourse determines the way of expressing information the author compares language and text embodiments of the same notions in the documents. In the documents of the two periods markers of unequal social identities of message senders and varying degrees of importance of the analyzed texts are identifi ed. А “drift” of the language of university documents away from Standard Russian is shown.

The article considers possibilities of using methods of cognitive and discourse analysis of dialect texts. Dialect is a special communication form characterized by cognitive activity specifi city, a number of speech genres, metalinguistic potential. These features are determined by the type of traditional folk speech culture and can be found out through discourse and cognitive analysis methods. The article discusses main features of dialect discourse. The author defines the problem of cognitive analysis methods. Because the language introspection method does not seem to work for dialect texts in the oral form, the author demonstrates that the cognitive introspection method may be a solution. Key concepts of folk culture and declarative knowledge types are analyzed. The author suggests that a separate discipline – cognitive dialectology – characterized by its own target, aspects and methods of study should be established. 

The article discusses the pragmatic intentions which can be found in humanistic text and discourse and realized at the level of academic communication and at the level of conceptual modeling of the object of scientifi c description. Conceptual metaphor appears as a basic tool of such modeling. The methodology of the research is based on the theory of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. The way of metaphorical modelling, regarded as a pragmatic aspect of the academic text, is analyzed on the basis of philosophical articles by V. Rudnev.

The article presents the results of a socio-psycholinguistic research into the efficiency of communication on the websites of the state bodies of the Altai region. Relying on cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistic approaches, the study reveals the mechanisms of communicative influence exercised by state bodies on focus groups and analyses the efficiency of strategies and tactics employed on the websites of the state bodies. The article further scrutinizes various socio-psycholinguistic variables of the communicative model, including the tone and style of interaction on these websites, dominant type of social-communicative interaction, dominant psycholinguistic scenarios, etc.

The article considers the modern organization as an association of people based on a system of values that has a hierarchical structure with the selected functional responsibilities of the members of this organization. We consider a new area of applied research “organizational linguistics” (the proposed theoretical approach, terminology, a number of methods and organizations research from the perspective of linguistics and psycholinguistics).

The article focuses on methods of analysis of modern Russian political discourse. The methodological basis for the linguistic research of civic society formation includes revealing of mass consciousness attitudes through “key words”, competition of definitions, etc. The author concludes that the choice of nomination and its discussion are the indicators of the competition of interpretations.

This article describes discursive practices of citizens’ movements in Russia since 2000. Creative forms of protest are considered, where language is used as a medium for expressing opinion and as well as an instrument of self-expression. Cultural backgrounds and linguistic aspects of protest forms are explained on the example of three phenomena – padonki, demotivators and monstration. The analysis is based on the principles of cultural linguistics. It is concerned with discourses of various institutions and communication forms. Accordingly, de-monstrations are considered on the one hand as part of non-violent protest in political discourse and on the other hand with reference to their specific features.

The author proposes to apply a sociolinguistic approach to the study of poetic language. Poetic language is defi ned as socially determined and socially differentiated. The article discusses poetic idiolects and micro- and macro- sociolects, i.e. the languages of poetic schools, regiolects, and poetic Koine.

The article presents results of an empirical investigation of professional metaphors, using nomothetic methods. It is shown that professional metaphors represent a complex nomination, formed at the expense of using elements which are parts of the studied phenomenon. Objectivation of results of environment effects is taken into account in the analysis.

The article presents the overview of the main approaches to the interpretation of the term concept and the methods of studying this phenomenon from the perspective of the recently popular cognitive linguistic paradigm.

This methodological article deals with how we can use the Corpus of Spoken Russian that is part of the Russian National Corpus as a source of language data for studying conceptualization. It is claimed that spoken corpora are better suited to this purpose than corpora of written texts or other sources of language data. The article describes the benefits of material that consists of units of spoken discourse rather than written sentences, even when we study questions that are not primarily related to spoken language. The notion of conceptualization refers to how humans categorize and classify their perceptions on the basis of how their bodies are built and what they know about the functioning and characteristics of different objects. The main benefi t of material from the spoken corpus for studying these phenomena is the spontaneity of such material – in speech we do not have the time to make deliberate choices, so that spoken language reflects our conceptual processes in their purest form. Also, spoken language is not corrected and neutralized by others, as is often the case with the language of published texts. As examples of questions that can be studied with spoken corpus material I introduce the Russian onomatopoeic word bac ‘bang’ and the actant structure of the verb form podderzhivaet ‘supports’. 

The article describes a psycholinguistic approach to the linguistic picture of the world model. The verbal associative network of the Russian language based on the wide-scale associative experiment materials is considered a model of the linguistic worldview of a “naïve” native speaker. The material from a direct associative dictionary makes it possible to observe the systemic character of the knowledge that is designated by the bodies of signs (i.e. words) of a given language, while a reverse dictionary allows observing the systemic character of the world image of naïve (ordinary) culture members through analyzing the core of the verbal associative network.

The paper discusses the problem of territorial variation of the national linguistic picture of the world. Features of conceptualization of reality, which are inherent in language varieties, are studied with reference to the Northern Russian dialects. Certain types of discrepancies between the dialects and Standard Russian are identified.

The paper deals with a popular trend in Russian studies of tracing specific features of Russian worldview in syntactic patterns. It is argued that the selection of features symptomatic of a particular linguistic model of the world is (pre)determined by another language taken as background and that the interpretations of particular linguistic features are usually based on stereotypes which have very little to do with scientific explanations.

This paper describes the advantages of using the Russian National Corpus in paremiography and synthesizes the author’s experience in the elaboration of the Russian part of Refranero multilingüe designed to provide the translation of popular Spanish proverbs into all the languages of the Iberian peninsula and into the main European languages. The use of National Corpus helps to detemine to determine the proverb list and to describe diachronic changes and variational processes in paremiology while being useful for researching neologisms and detecting updated/outdated proverbs.

The paper analyzes the dialectical method as a method of research and comparison of philosophical term systems. The object of study is philosophical terminology of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The paper presents a typology of terms and demonstrates the efficiency of the dialectical method for revealing essential features of philosophical terminology.

Theolinguistics is a new trend in modern linguistics. The report discusses the following issues: terminology problems are considered, the question of the subject and methods of research is raised, the history of theolinguistic research is described, and a new direction – lingvoteologiya – is offered.

The author analyzes the linguistic theories used in onomastic studies of theonyms. It appears that a reconstruction of the religious picture of the world allows to show a complicated inner world of the “speaking person”. A human being is seen in here in theo-anthropo-cosmic paradigm developed by the Russian philosophical school. The ontological theory of language presents the relations between gnoseology and ontology in a new way, demonstrates verbal and symbolic nature of culture, shows homo loquens as a unique place where the creative word is born and dwells.

In the paper a new typology of units used in spoken Russian is worked out on the basis of their language and speech characteristics. The methods are described in terms of five key principles. A system of units is set up, and the domains of their usage and functions are described. The new approach has made it possible to reveal the field structure of oral communication domains and their units.

In the paper, spoken word recognition is considered as a black box system. The authors formulate basic methodological principles of spoken word recognition research based on the analysis of the experiments in the fi eld and tested on spontaneous Russian.

The necessity of foregrounding retrospective approach while studying live speech of a non-contemporary personality has been recognized. A need for the introduction of more active retrospection is highlighted by research into Ivan Franko’s communicative competence.

The article reviews verbal hesitatives, specifi c elements of spontaneous speech which occur at problematic points of speech making, fi ll in hesitation pauses and also have a function of a word, word combination or phrase search. Special attention is paid to situations in which speakers, having found the  necessary unit of speech, in a way distance themselves from it, contemplating, as if they were disclaiming the responsibility for the correctness of the nomination, showing their attitude to the particular unit (expressions such as “what do you call it”, “let’s put it this way”, “so-called”, etc. in the speech flow).

The article describes the Speech Corpus of the Russian Language, created at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University. The corpus consists of two modules. The first module contains monologic speech of native speakers, recorded in the situations of various speech scenarios (reading, retelling, picture description, story-telling), strictly balanced along linguistic, social and psychological criteria. The second module contains everyday speech, mostly dialogic, recorded using the method of 24-hour continuous recording (“One Speaker’s Day”). The Speech Corpus of the Russian Language contains more than 500 hours of recordings; the specialized linguistic information system is built upon the corpus content, and numerous multidimensional studies of Russian oral communication are currently being conducted.

The study of spontaneous speech requires that it be transcribed and analyzed objectively. The method of continuous transcription minimizes the infl uence of lexical and grammatical information in the course of data processing. Asemantic (monosyllabic) speech fragments are analyzed aurally with simultaneous observation of oscillograms and spectrograms. New data concerning reduction and sound contraction in spontaneous Russian have been obtained. The results of the research allow formulating hypotheses concerning the recognition of spontaneous speech that should be verifi ed in perceptual experiments.

The article is a systematic review of programs focused on phonosemantic analysis of word/text available on the Internet. Advantages and disadvantages of these programs are examined. It is concluded that the majority of the existing programs lacks the initial validity, which ultimately infl uences the results of the work. It is posited that linguistic and psychological interpretation of the obtained data used in scientific studies be applied.