The article offers an approach to the associative field of the word meaning as to the fractal formation, the description of which is possible through the features of this action in the multiscale recursions.

The “Russian Lexical Fund of the 18th century” Project is aimed to create a general Register of Russian vocabulary of the 18th century. The Register is empirically based on the Card Index of the “Russian Dictionary of the 18th Century”, as well as on additional excerpts from newly printed sources and manuscripts. The creation of a General Register of Russian vocabulary of the New Time is of current interest both for historical lexicology and lexicography. The Register allows getting information on a certain word, its presence or absence in the language of the 18th century. It also provides a maximally complete material to comprehend the processes of formation of nationally based and literarily developed Russian lexical fund of the 18th century.

The paper focuses on the issue of historical lexicology, in particular its dynamic character. The authors discuss the main problems prompted by the work on The Dictionary of the 19th Century Russian, which represents a new, original form of the special large-scale historical dictionary of a differential type. The purpose of the dictionary and the consideration of different types of language conditions, forms of language existence and concrete language situations inflence the project and the character of the future dictionary.

The article considers word formation types for identifi cation of people – nomina agentis – in Standard Russian. The material analyzed is representative, due to the use of dictionaries, Russian National Corpus and texts from the mass media.

The article presents the following trends in research on language innovations: structural-semantic, sociolinguistic, communicative, cognitive and psycholinguistic. Particular attention is paid to the  pragmalinguistic approach to the facts of language and speech. The new instances of modern media word creation are considered form the functional-pragmatic perspective.

The article presents the results of the structural-semantic analysis of 106 derivatives from the root “врем” (nouns, adjectives, verbs and predicatives) included in Gift of Eloquence – the projective lexicon by M. Epshtein. Suffixation, composition, contamination and the affixoidal method are considered to be highly productive ways of forming lexemes, denoting agents and abstract notions.

In accordance with the view that language is iconic in origin the author assumes that the primary lexical and semantic core of language was formed by iconic lexoids (monosyllabic prototypes of words) in which an initial consonant sound or a phonotype carries the dominant semiotic weight. Thus, initial consonants occur as prehistoric classifi ers in word structure, while the set of these established primary classes (meanings, categories) could be considered as the protoconceptual system of language. The study of the phonosemantic space of Russian words with the initial d- made it possible to defi ne the location of the Russian do (preposition and prefi x) meanings in this space and their descent from the semantic prototype “Pull” or from the mere index gesture of the dental articulation.

In the article the question of Internet search materials as the empirical basis of linguistic research is considered. The author demonstrates the possibilities that this source provides for the study of occasional use of words, for defining regularity and frequency of the language fact and for the description of word variation.

The Polish-Russian Parallel Corpus has been developed at the University of Warsaw (the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Russian Studies) in co-operation with the National Corpus of Polish and the Russian National Corpus. The annotation and search possibilities in the corpus result from the annotation of the co-operating national corpora. The search interface is based on the user-friendly interface of the Russian National Corpus. The corpus consists of Russian and Polish literary classics (90%), nonfi ction books and legal texts (5%), religious texts (i.e. Bible translations; 4%) and contemporary press articles (1%). Great Russian realistic novels of the 19th century, together with the modern Russian books (e.g. by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Victor Erofeyev) which are the most popular in Poland, made up a signifi cant part of the corpus. We have also taken into account these works of Polish literature that are the most widely known in Russia. Looking for loci communes in the Russian and Polish cultures was an important, extra-linguistic aspect of the corpus project. 

In the modern science of translation, the term ‘parallel texts’ is used to denote target texts belonging to the same content area and devoted to the same subject as the original texts in the source language. Such texts are regarded as a material aid for the translators in both the reception of original texts as well as creation of target counterparts, especially when they need to select appropriate linguistic items. The article, though, points to another plausible application of parallel texts, i.e. as a material for determining equivalents in lexicographical work. This thesis is illustrated on the basis of an experiment involving the creation of a Russian-Polish dictionary of archaeological terms, which uses the target language parallel corpus as the source material. Out of the three tested sources used to fi nd Russian equivalents for Polish archaeological terms, i.e. dictionaries, parallel texts and the author’s source, the parallel text has turned out to be the most effective, as it yielded, depending on a particular subject, from 48% to 60% equivalents. The article presents both advantages and limitations of the lexicographical method discussed above. 

Structural-semantic fi eld of modern Russian linguistics has continued the tradition of classical linguistics. Postulates of the theory of transition and syncretism in line with the above mentioned trend are related to the idea of fundamental instability of language, with the view of language as a complex self-organizing system. The author analyses syncretic phenomena as a manifestation of latent resources of language, filling of established forms with new content, “growth points”, and shows the potential of the presented approach with reference to the morphology of modern Russian in describing transformation processes and phenomena of functional homonymy. The complex of homonyms glavnoe contains adjectives, nouns, modal words, particles and a component of conjunction complex. The study is based on works of Russian classical and modern literature. 

Russian is known to have layers of derived vocabulary whose structural form evokes an association with another part of speech. This induces the usage of such words in a syntactic context not characteristic of them but based on the analogy of the association object. On the basis of modern fiction, mass-media and spoken language this paper considers the variety of backward transitivity, or retransposition, that in the author’s opinion may illustrate the processes of convergence and divergence in the structure of the language.

A major challenge in linguistics today is to take advantage of the data and sophisticated analytical tools available to us in the service of questions that are both theoretically interesting and practically useful. I offer linguistic profi les as one way to join theoretical insight to empirical research. Linguistic profiles are a more narrowly targeted type of behavioral profiling, focusing on a specific factor and how it is distributed across language forms. I present case studies using Russian data and illustrating three types of linguistic profiling analyses: grammatical profiles, semantic profiles, and constructional profi es. In connection with each case study I identify theoretical issues and show how they can be operationalized by means of profiles. The findings represent real gains in our understanding of Russian grammar that can also be utilized in both pedagogical and computational applications.

The article presents a diachronic corpus research of secondary imperfectivization of the Russian verb and, in this connection, discusses the signifi cance of the secondary imperfectivization in the theory of Russian aspect. Additionally, the development trend of secondary imperfectivization is discussed: its expansion, contraction or relative stability.

The paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the use of infinitives in Polish and Russian. Infinitive is a non-finite verb form developed from a verbal noun, preserving both nominal and verbal syntactic properties. The queries performed in the Polish-Russian Parallel Corpus and in the Parallel Corpus ParaSOl show that Russian more often than Polish allows the infinitive as a main predicate in a sentence and as a verb object. Polish, as well as other West Slavic languages, uses predominantly finite verb forms in the first function and verbal nouns in the latter. When compared with other Slavic languages, the Polish infinitive reveals another essential distinctive property: like Eas t Slavic languages Polish allows the final infinitive clause with the conjunction żeby, while other Slavic languages do not. The use of verbal nouns is extremely frequent in Polish, not only in comparison with Russian but also with other West Slavic languages. To obtain a more comprehensive analysis of Slavic infinitive, a matrix of all uses of infinitives in the text of the novel Kak zakoljalas’ stal’ and its translations into Slavic languages has been prepared and vi sualised by means of specialized software. The graph confirms a proximity within the East Slavic and the West Slavic groups – with the exception of Polish, which remains distant from both groups. 

Linguistic pragmatics has been established as a special branch because it deals with the conventions of the use of utterances and not the conventions of language, which are the subject of grammatical research. This article focuses on the functioning of the imperative in Russian in such speech acts as request, advice, suggestion and permission.

The article develops the theory of phase paradigmatics, introduces the term phase paradigm, describes its structure and criteria to determine phase relationships between verbs in the paradigm, and analyzes phase paradigms of the verbs of different semantics. The connection between categories of phase and aspect is shown by the presence of a phase invariant in all aspectual pairs, as well as by the presence of phase paradigms of verbs of both aspects.

The paper deals with the criteria for determining semantic calques in modern Russian. Case studies show that a semantic calque can be clearly attested only when there is a pre-established translation correspondence between the words of the source language and the target language. Special attention is paid to the examples of loan translations that underlie the replenishment of formerly defective number paradigms of abstract nouns such as продажа, озабоченность and практика.

This article is devoted to the analysis of current syntactic processes and to the qualification of syntactic units (syntactic complex, direct speech, etc.) on the basis of modern Russian prose and screenplay (e.g. L. Petrushevskaya, D. Rubina, V. Sorokin, V. Makanin, T. Tolstaya). The modern narrative discourse stimulates the development of new syntactic phenomena. The current syntactic processes are considered from the perspective of language, speech and text.

The article researches temporality as a specifier of semantic structure from the perspective of functional syntax. Temporality refl ects a perception and representation of the speaker’s time response in situations related to the moment of speech or to another reference point on the time axis. Within the framework of temporality the following phenomena are considered: time, irrelevant situations, recurring situations.

The paper is devoted to constructions with reflexive pronoun and an inanimate subject, e.g.Ovoshchi soderzhat v sebe vitaminy. The constructions include a transitive verb and reflexivesebya. Such reflexive constructions are the result of valence-increasing derivation. Theycorrelate with intransitive constructions, such as V ovoshchakh soderzhatsya vitaminy. Suchvalence-increasing derivation occurs in the domain of non-agentive meanings. The process of valence-increasing derivation is compared with valence-decreasing derivation as in Fortochkaotkrylas’.

This paper concentrates on problems of semantic text interpretation as well as on methods of linguistic investigation of Russian media texts. Apart from characteristic features of the Russian language (including the lexicon), symbols, networks of associations and valuation, these texts reflect not only the phenomena they describe, but also their authors’ views. This complexity requires an integrated approach to their interpretation.

The article is devoted to problems of philological hermeneutics. The author correlates the level of understanding of the art text and motivation of the language form of the text. The article provides examples of the analysis of understanding and interpretation of texts, e.g. a fairy tale by Stepan Pisakhov and poems by Czeslaw Milosz and Nikolaj Zabolotsky.

The article focuses on the Internet autobiographies of Russian TV workers. These texts are considered and analyzed as a speech genre from the cognitive perspective. The concept WORK is described as a main concept of this speech genre.

The article proves that linguotextual method could be applied not only to study various lists of a literary text but to look into different fragments of the particilar list as well. The paper justifi es the need to use genre principle to point out certain fragments in Primary Chronicle. The author defi nes genre types of the fragments.

The article describes the application of the lingvotekstologicheskу method in the study of lists of Stishnoy Prolog. The article presents the results of three stages of research: typological, textual and linguistic, reveals the importance of such research for the history of the Russian language and critical edition of the monument of writing.

The correspondence between the central notions of linguistic analysis of a literary text, i.e. sense, referent, image and picture can be analyzed on the basis of the functional-pragmatic methodology i.e. with relational, pragmatic, anthropocentric, and teleological view of the object. Aesthetic linguistic activity is considered as an experience of conscious creation of referents: realities (objects), a narrating subject, and an ethnic language that are characterized by creatability, inventability, and self-reference.

The article analyses the problems of the specifi city of the so-called “hieroglyphic” language of the works of Russian absurdist writer A.Vvedenskij. It is suggested that the hyletic approach might be fruitfully applied in the study of other absurd literary texts.

The article deals with differences between the sources of information about the image of the author and the image of the addressee, which are implicitly expressed in memoirs as well as in other non-fi ction texts. It is shown that the image of the author can be inferred from what is said in the text on the basis of B. A. Uspensky’s theory presented in “The poetics of composition”, while the image of the addressee can be inferred from how it is said in the text with the help of H. P. Grice’s conversational maxims.

The article uses two psycholinguistic methods – semantic differential and reverse text method – to discover the mechanisms behind the formation, perception and comprehension of formal texts employing offi cial-administrative type of discourse. It is demonstrated that the way texts are perceived and comprehended is conditioned by individual psychological traits of recipients, their professions, social roles, spheres of activity as well as by the features of the texts themselves.

The article presents the results of experimental research using the semantic differential method. The efficiency of this method for exposure of emotional and evaluative components of directive document perception by teachers-recipients is demonstrated. The experiment results are verifi ed by means of group interview data obtained with the focus groups method.

This paper is a cross-linguistic study of pronoun interpretation in various syntactic construction across three groups of language speakers: non-brain-damaged adults, children (age 4–5), and agrammatic aphasic patients. Using the obtained experimental results as a tool, and comparing data from different languages, we managed to determine the main principles responsible for pronoun interpretation which are consistent with the Primitives of Binding framework. This theory combines the modular approach to the language system with the economy principle in the process of reference assignment. Special attention is paid to methodological questions, especially to procedure choice and stimuli adaptation.