Modern Russian Language Research Articles

On the criteria for detracting stable models from fixed phrase schemes

The article is devoted to the identification of a system of criteria that allow to distinguish stable models from fixed phrase schemes. The distinction between stable models and fixed phrase schemes as different classes of syntactic phraseological units is one of the most complex and important problems of the modern theory of syntactic phraseology. An additional difficulty lies in the fact that fixed phrase schemes belong to the core of syntactic phraseology, and stable models to its periphery. The solution to this problem is the relevance, purpose and novelty of this study. The language material is borrowed from the specialized dictionary of the author of the study. The total number of syntactic constructions analyzed is 123 fixed phrase schemes. Illustrative material is borrowed from the texts of fiction, the language of which qualifies as the modern Russian language. The study uses the descriptive method, the method of component analysis of the semantic structure of the sentence, syntactic modeling, phraseological analysis, transformational method, as well as methods of etymological, contextual and comparative analysis. Stable models of the Russian Language are investigated in the aspect of the syntactic phraseology theory: a set of characteristics is defined that allow them to be considered in the system of various classes of syntactic phraseological units, as well as allowing them to be distinguished from free syntactic constructions; integral and differential features of stable models and fixed phrase schemes are established, which are qualified as absolute (differentiating) and relative (optional). Absolute criteria include the following: the nature of rethinking the producing syntactic construction (a single lexeme or the entire syntactic construction as a whole is being rethought); the presence/absence of a compulsory component; the presence/absence of deactualization/ grammaticalization/lexicization of the syntactic structure components; the presence/absence of transformation of the syntactic meaning of the producing structure. The relative criteria are the following: relevance/irrelevance of parsing; the presence/absence of transformation of the functional type of the producing syntactic construction.

Russian Philology at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod in the Light of Modern Strategies of Scholarly Search

The article highlights the main scholarly trends in Russian philology, which are being developed by the scholars of the Institute of Philology and Journalism of Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. In the last 20 years, the Chair of Modern Russian and General Linguistics has been working on a new scholarly research area related to the study of active processes in the modern Russian language. The Chair of Teaching Russian Language in other Language Environments has created and successfully tested a methodology for describing the concepts of Russian culture, which involves identifying a variety of paradigmatic, syntagmatic, derivational relationships of words nominating the concept in direct textual use, as well as analyzing the interpretation of the word in dictionaries. The Chair of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics actively develops cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, linguopoetics, as well as the theory and practice of carrying out the linguistic expertise. An important component of the scholarly research of members of the Chair of Slavic Philology and Culture is the study of the history of the Russian language, modern Slavic languages, Russian literature of the 19th–21st centuries in its connections with the literature of the Eastern and Western Slavs. At the Chair of Russian Literature, serious research is being carried out in the field of studying A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, classical and modern Russian lyrics, spiritual poetry, artistic anthropology, folklore and literary local history. The article draws the conclusion that an effective scholarly environment has been created and is actively functioning at Lobachevsky National Research University of Nizhny Novgorod so far, which conduces to further consolidation of contribution of Nizhny Novgorod Russian language scholars to the most prominent areas of modern national humanitarian knowledge.

The phenomenon of homonymy of new borrowings in the modern Russian language

The phenomenon of homonymy of new borrowings in the modern Russian language

The means of expression of case category in modern Azerbaijani and Russian languages

The means of expression of case category in modern Azerbaijani and Russian languages

On the category of “secular” in Justinian’s Novels (on the example of concepts λαϊκός, ἰδιώτης, κοσμικός)

The purpose of this article is to identify, which of the original connotations in the authentic Greek text of Justinian’s Novels (VI century) contained the categories, for which the researchers would use the term “secular” in order to understand and translate into modern Russian and English languages, in the extent that this translation analogy is justified. The research is performed using the method of analyzing the expressions, which are close in meaning to the concepts of “secular”, “non-church”, “non-religious”, based on the original Greek text of the Collection of 168 Novels (stereotype edition by Schoell and Kroll, 1912) and their dictionary interpretations. The analysis included the comparison of the ways these expressions were used in different parts of the original Greek text of Justinian’s Novels, as well as their comparison with historical Latin translations and the modern translation into Russian and English. The article analyzes the semantic connotations of the concepts of λαϊκός, ἰδιώτης, κοσμικός, and related expressions κοσμικός βίος, κοσμικὴ διαγωγὴ and ἰδιωτικὴ διαγωγὴ. The author concludes that these concepts in Justinian’s Novels were not legally special. They also designated (or constructed) neither special area of “secular” nor a special social group of “laity”, but they were used apophatically to explain and emphasize the special status of the clergy and the church institution. The more precise meaning of λαϊκός, ἰδιώτης, κοσμικός is the state and pastime of persons, who did not hold any positions, including those at the church.

On the question of differential features of religious style and its place in the stylistic system of the modern Russian language

On the question of differential features of religious style and its place in the stylistic system of the modern Russian language

V Nikuda (“To Nоwhere”): From Poeticism to the Element of Everyday Language

The article deals with the results of a study of the history of the emergence and functioning of the Russian idiom в никуда “to nowhere”, which is a substantiated pronominal adverb of place никуда (“nowhere” or “anywhere” in different contexts) with the preposition of direction в (“to”). The idiom в никуда “to nowhere” is part of the expressive means of various styles of the modern Russian language, including colloquial speech and journalism, and the expressiveness of this idiom is due to the unusual, “irregularity” of its construction, which, in principle, is not typical for Russian speech. The analysis of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NRC) showed that the idiom в никуда “to nowhere” is as stable as poeticism. In modern Russian, it is much more frequent in the poetic subcorpus of the NRC than in other subcorpora. The unit under study can be found in the works of poets of all directions, including such well-known ones as Brodskiy, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Slutskiy, Heinrich Sapgir, Boris Ryzhiy, etc. Further, for the first time among the texts of the corpus, the described unit is found in the work of the symbolist poet Ivan Rukavishnikov, written no later than 1910. At the same time, in the first decades of its existence, unlike today, the unit в никуда “to nowhere” is found exclusively in poetic contexts and only from the late 1930s penetrates into everyday and journalistic discourses. The study was carried out using such methods as corpus analysis, the method of calculating the overall frequency of a lexeme, which in this case was applied to an idiom, and the source study method. The material was NRC data and Google.books collections. The history of the idiom в никуда “to nowhere” demonstrates the mechanism of the penetration of poeticisms into the national language.

Typology of the Thematic Group “Toys” in the Russian Language of the 21st Century

In the article, the author addresses the definitions of the concept of “toys” and their functions, as well as existing classifications in psychology, pedagogy, didactics and marketing (trade). The definitions of a “thematic group” (TG) are considered and a working formulation of the concept is given. A morphological and syntactic analysis of the collected empirical base was carried out, where the names of toys and games, works of children’s literature and the National Corpus of the Russian Language were selected as sources. Several types of lexical units of the TG “Toys” are presented: individual lexemes (nouns, adjectives, verbs), phrases (simple, multi-component). The author also identifies five groups of verbs: expressing rational, irrational action; actions characteristic of a person, sounds and verbs of movement. Based on the analyzed classifications and collected empirical material (1800 lexemes related to the TG “Toys”), a typology is created that reflects systemic relationships at the lexical level of the modern Russian language. Three main thematic areas, fields of nominations for this TG in the Russian language of the 21st century have been identified: natural, artificial and virtual toys. The thematic area “Natural toys” includes two subgroups: natural objects and household objects. The composition of the term “Artificial toys” is described by ten lexical-semantic groups. The thematic area “Virtual toys” includes three lexical and semantic groups. The identification of the third TO — “Virtual toys” — is a new phenomenon for the classification of toys not only in linguistics, but also in the wide field of this concept.

Oral and written speech interpretation in sustainable development of ecological education

Ecologist in today’s world should know the terminology in related to ecology areas. Thus, modern ecological education should be accompanied with the development of some nature interpretation skills within the language. In many languages, there is a special category of words – onomatopoeia (onomatopes), which conditionally reproduce various sounds that exist in nature: bam, bom, bang, bul, boom, cap, ding, chik, smack, upchi, etc. Onomatopoeia (onomatopoeia) occupies a prominent place among the "peripheral", marginal phenomena of language, and the interest of linguists in onomatopoeia is by no means accidental. Onomatopoeic words, due to their figurativeness, high stylistic expressiveness and phonetic instability, are of great interest to researchers. The present study is a comprehensive study of the structure, semantics, and stylistics of onomatopoeia in modern Russian and English. The result of the study is a comprehensive description of the structure of onomatopoeia, as well as a comprehensive examination of their semantic and stylistic aspects of the modern Russian language in comparison with English, as well as the definition of patterns in their translation.

Geometrical Images in Lexis and Phraseology of Modern Russian Language

The article reviews geometrical objects as a factor forming the image system of modern Russian language, and explores the lexical units motivated by the concept of geometrical objects and phraseological units with geometrical components. This approach reveals multiplicity of geometrical objects participating in the process: there are three-dimensional (sphere, spatial angle, etc.), two-dimensional (circle), one-dimensional (line, etc.) and geometrical objects without dimension (point). When considering the language material the author uses the concept of the inner form of the word. Numerous examples are given demonstrating the process of geometric metaphorization. The analysis has shown that circle and spatial angle demonstrate high activity in forming lexical and phraseological units under consideration. Many of those geometrical images have an ancient origin. The article also touches on the issue of national characteristics of the perception of angles and circles. Some examples given by the author indicate the further development of language phenomena motivated by the concept of those geometrical objects in our time. Modern trends in the development of geometric imagery in the Russian language have been identified. The role of such geometric objects as a point, line, edge, etc. in the modern process of enriching the figurative structure of the Russian language is noted. The issues of lexical compatibility of the studied words are considered, the tendency of its change and expansion is traced. Modern trends of development of geometrical imagery in Russian language as a systematic process reflecting essential features of national view of the world are revealed.

On the Textual Structure of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Works, Intonation Punctuation of the 19th Century and the Grammatical Norm of the Modern Russian Language (Based on the Material of the 9th Volume of the Complete Works of F. M. Dostoevsky in 35 Volumes. St. Petersburg, Nauka Publ., 2020. 1029 p.)

The article contains an analysis of a number of textual and historical-literary issues related to the academic publication of the works of F.M. Dostoevsky, the problem of preserving the author’s style of the writer when bringing the text to the norms of modern spelling and punctuation is considered. The importance of the question of the inconsistency of the “intonation&8j1; punctuation of the 19th with the modern grammatical norm, assuming the semantic principle of punctuation marks, is pointed out. The preservation of individual elements of archaic punctuation when reading in modern Russian has a destructive effect on the meaning of the phrase. The article contains a number of examples showing the inapplicability within the modern grammatical norm of elements of the old spelling and punctuation.

Ностальгический маркетинг: прецедентные тексты советского периода в постсоветской рекламе

The article is devoted to the analysis of precedent texts of the Soviet period used in modern Russian-language advertising messages. Despite the high interest of researchers in the problem of intertext interaction, the study of precedent phenomena updated in advertising remains relevant due to the high dynamism of the advertising industry. The author offers a typology of polycode precedent signs of Soviet culture used in post-Soviet advertising, and also considers the reasons for the increased interest of copywriters in Soviet precedent texts. The following are highlighted as visual precedent identifiers of Soviet discourse broadcast in advertising: font, color, graphics and design, symbols related to the culture and history of the Soviet Union. Verbal precedent texts of the Soviet period are presented by quotes from the poetry of V. Mayakovsky, Soviet books, films and cartoons, songs, slogans of Soviet advertising, phrase schemes of agitation posters, etc. The reasons for the use of Soviet precedent phenomena are determined by the game nature of the impact, appeal to traditions, quality, positive emotions, memory, etc. Thus, as the basic functions of precedent phenomena of the Soviet period in modern advertising, according to the author, one can single out attractive and persuasive functions. All proposed typologies are supported by examples. The article pays special attention to the consideration of product categories, when promoting which appeal to Soviet precedents is the most frequent: naming and strategy for positioning banks and financial services, discourse of club events. The material for the study was the texts of Russian commercial advertising (in total, morethan 100 texts of different formats and genres were considered). The basic method was intertextual analysis, as well as descriptive-analytical, communicative-pragmatic and other methods.

On the Reasons for the Growth of Analyticism and Productivity of Non-Idiomatic Nominations in the Russian Language of our Days

The article is aimed at finding ways for a systematically grounded determination of the causes of diachronic changes in any language, i.e. at the creation a way to explain any linguistic changes not by arbitrarily chosen single causes, but as a result of the interaction of social factors and intralinguistic factors caused by them. The article focuses on two processes taking place in the modern Russian language: the loss of declension by toponyms ending in -in(o), -ov(o) (for example, Ya zhivu v Pushkino / Butovo instead of Ya zhivu v Pushkine / Butove) and the replacement of the toponymic model Pushkinskaya ulitsa (ʻPushkin streetʼ) with the model ulitsa Pushkina (ʻthe street of Pushkinʼ). It is shown that the initial cause of both phenomena is social. It consists in strengthening the internal migration of the Russian population, as well as in the widespread dissemination of the media. As a result, the language community begins to consist of such native speakers who previously lived in different regions of the country or belonged to different social groups and therefore have mismatched background knowledge. The inability to rely on the knowledge of the recipients forces senders of messages, firstly, to avoid using am- biguous case forms (for example, when following the old norm in the sentence Ya zhivu v Pushkine, it remains unclear what the initial form of the toponym is: Pushkin or Pushkino), and secondly, to avoid using idiomatic toponymic models, since they do not make it possible to determine from which word the toponym is derived (the modern non-idiomatic toponym ulitsa Akademika Komarova (ʻStreet of Academician Komarovʼ) is much more unambiguous than the toponyms Komarovskaya ulitsa (ʻKomarovskaya Streetʼ) or ulitsa Komarovka (ʻKomarovka Streetʼ) built according to the old model).

The Ural Poetic School: Phantom or Reality

This article problematises the use of the “modern Ural poetry” descriptive construction denoting the poetic space of a particular region and considers Ural poetry in a broader context of Russian-language literature. They can be understood differently depending on the researcher’s approach and the research methodology. Thus, it may be regarded as a segment within regional literature, regional poetry, or as a cultural space that exists over territories and borders. What matters is the globalised concept which resolves the opposition between the centre and the province, which is imperative for Russian culture. The analysis of Ural poetry in such a conceptual framework actualises several issues. More particularly, to what extent can regional specificity be decisive for the poetry of the Urals? And what makes up this specificity: poetics, Ural identity, a set of Ural myths, or the structure of a poetic community? How are the boundaries of Ural poetry manifested? What is the degree of its correlation with what is done outside the region? The Ural Poetry School, a project of poet and literary manager V. O. Kalpidi, gives the most important answers to these questions. The article considers the conceptual basis of the project and those significant theoretical and practical changes that have taken place over more than two decades of its existence, especially after the emergence of poetic projects under the InVersiya brand in the late 2010s which presented an alternative view of the development of Ural poetry. This generational and worldview gap fostered the distinction between modern Ural poetry and the Russian-language poetry of the Urals. A closed poetic space with tangible boundaries, its structure and logic of development, which claimed to be the Centre as originally thought by the UPS, has turned into a space that is an organic part of something larger and decentralised. The article emphasises that the view of the poetry of the Urals as a segment of modern Russian-language poetry makes it possible to revise the existing set of myths and ideas and provides more accurate tools for describing it.

О гибридном словосложении в русском языке в эпоху глобализации

The article describes in detail some derivational elements involved in the process of agglutination occurring in word-formation system of modern Russian, analyzing semantic and functional characteristics of these word-building elements. The comprehensive analysis of the collected hybrid derivatives shows that globalization and the Anglo-American ‘linguistic hegemony’ increased the productivity of international morphemes, penetrating into the Russian word-formation system through the mass media. Modern Russian language has been undergoing noticeable changes in word-formation models and in the inventory of actively productive derivational affixes. The following processes are noticeable: 1) resemantization and activation of international affixes; 2) development of new hybrid derivative models; 3) creation with the help of morphemes abstracted from composites new formally and semantically condensed nouns, which allows to notice an agglutination’s tendency.

Речевые средства коммуникативного контакта в современном русском языке

The central task of this article was to describe the nomenclature of multi-level verbal means that serve to establish, transform and maintain verbal interaction. From the standpoint of the integrativecomparative approach being developed, the paper outlines the integral and differential features of these verbal means as components of the system of pragmatically valent contactives of the modern Russian language. As the main research method, a comprehensive corpus-contextual analysis was used, providing objectivity and a possibility of verifying the desired results. Dominant and peripheral zones were identified, specific hierarchical relationships of their actualization in texts were established, and the structure and part-of-speech affiliation of contactives were analysed. This determines the novelty and practical significance of the paper, which expands the base of theoretical and methodological information about the system of such verbal means as contactives by filling in the gaps in modern linguistic knowledge in the range of detecting universal and specific ways of manifestation of national-cultural and individual attitudes in the process of verbal interaction, as well as in understanding these verbal means as elements that identify specific features of the participants in communication. As the material for the study, we used texts from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, representing situations of establishing, transforming and maintaining verbal communication. The research proved (based on the material of a single national corpus, i.e. National Corpus of the Russian Language) the productivity of the integrative-comparative strategy in general and corpus-contextual analysis in particular in solving the problem of systematic description of verbal means that explicate the communicative situation in the totality of all its components.

Голофрастические конструкции в языке интернет-коммуникации

Introduction. Internet communication is one of the most actively developed and still insufficiently developed areas in modern linguistics. Its linguistic features are reflected at all levels of the language system, and, therefore, require additional research, in particular, in the field of occasional ways of word formation.
 The purpose of this article is to study and systematize the scientific literature on the designated problem, analyze the language material, identify typical word–formation neoplasms characteristic of Internet communication,
 The medological basis of the study was the works of Galichkina E.N., Goroshko E.I., Ivanov L.Yu., Kolokoltseva T.N., Krongauza M.A., Lutovinova O.V., Mechkovskaya N.B., Ryazantseva T.I., Shchipitsina L.Yu., which predetermined the choice of methods for observing language material and its interpretation. The texts of works of art, websites, forums, and chats were the material for analysis.
 A review of the scientific literature has shown that one of the striking features of Internet communication is the occasional formation of words from phrases and sentences through holophrasis. This phenomenon is typical, as a rule, for the language of works of art. This was revealed on the material of the story by Yu .Maletsky "Love". The analysis of the speech material of Internet communication confirmed that holophrastic constructions are also characteristic of this speech formation. This allowed us to conclude that the phenomena observed in the language of the Internet are a reflection of the processes in the Russian language.
 The scientific novelty of the research is as follows: linguistic research in the field of Internet communication will allow to predict the processes in the modern Russian language as a whole. The practical significance of the work lies in the possibility of using the results in the study of active processes in modern Russian.

Глагольно-именные сочетания с семантикой зрительного восприятия: синхронно-диахронический аспект

The article deals with the issue of perception representation potential by Russian verbs. The study is focused on stylistically marked verb-and-nominal phrases with the meaning of visual perception (vperit' glaza / vzgljad / vzor; lupit' glaza; pjalit' glaza; taraschit' glaza). The analysis was based on various materials from lexicographic sources that reflect the state of the Russian language in various periods of its evaluation and the data from the National Russian Language Corpus on functioning of verb-and-nominal phrases. The complex approach made it possible to identify collocation potential of the language units under analysis in modern Russian language and to define limitations on their usage in fiction and media styles. Semantic changes in the meaning of verbal constituents define patterns aimed at constructing semantics of perception in a pair with the nouns of perception that represent intense visual ability to perceive. It is concluded that semantic changes are based on correlation between the process of visual perception and another process that is not directly associated with the instance of perceiving, but may be apprehended with the sight conceptualization (during movement in space or physical impact at an object). The results might become the basis for further studies in the field of sensory linguistics.

II Interuniversity Online Scientific Seminar in Memoriam of Professor Vera V. Babaytseva “Multiaspectivenes of Language and Speech Units” (Novosibirsk, NSU, February 10, 2022)

The review on the scientific seminar in memoriam of Professor V. V. Babaytseva devoted to the problem of multiaspectiveness of the language and speech units. The seminar took place online on the digital platform of Novosibirsk National Research State University and joined scholars from twelve universities of Russia (Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Orel, Ufa, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok) and China (Beijing). Different scientific directions were presented there: the School of synchronous transitivity (formed by Vera Vasilievna Babaitseva) and Novosibirsk syntactic school (formed by Maya Ivanovna Cheremisina). Presented reports covered number of topical grammar issues of the modern Russian language: problems of morphology discussed by Natalia Petrova, Anna Bertiakova, Elena Sorokina, and Maria Milovanova; problems of syntax addressed by Natalia Koshkareva, Irina Vysotskaya, and Larisa Bednarskaya. The seminar’s main theme was the linguistic mechanisms behind the formation of grammatical semantics and ways of its interpreting. A number of accounts were based on the literary language of Alexander Pushkin (a report by Irina Fadeeva), Nikolai Gogol (a report by Ekaterina Ogoltseva), Vasiliy Shukshin (a report by Galiya Khisamova). Zhou Haiyan presented her monograph “The Study of Transient Phenomena in Russian Grammar” (Beijing: Peking University, 2021). Maria Milovanova announced the publication of a collective monograph “General and Russian Linguoaxiology” (Moscow: Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushkin State Institute of Russian Language, 2022) A report by Tatiana Guskova expressed the idea of a multiple-aspect study of Professor Babaitseva's creative heritage.

Lessons according to Shansky: the potential of N. M. Shansky’s legacy to overcome the challenges posed to the modern Russian language teacher

The paper considers N. M. Shansky’s scientific and popular scientific writings as a resource available to a modern teacher of the Russian language. Teachers can use these materials to spark students’ interest in studying Russian, to enhance their research skills and their ability to identify patterns and discrepancies between the phenomena under consideration, including the development of project research assignments. The study analysed scientific, educational, scientific reference, and popular scientific sources. It also employed observation, search, and descriptive methods as well as comparative analysis and scientific modelling. The paper presents those tasks whose content is based on the ideas and information reflected in N. M. Shansky’s works. I propose using such tasks in studying lexicology and phraseology, word formation and spelling, in mastering the functional varieties of the Russian language, and in characterising the stylistic features of texts of different types. The paper describes a variety of techniques for working with etymological, explanatory (defining), phraseological dictionaries, and literary sources. It also includes tasks for comparing entries in dictionaries of the same type as well as scientific reference and popular scientific texts. The paper provides materials for language warmups, entertaining tasks, topics for research papers. Additionally, I show the feasibility of using groupwork and referring to Internet resources. The paper concludes by arguing for the enduring value of the ideas suggested in the scientist’s works. Moreover, I highlight the potential of these materials for developing modern students’ crucial competencies as well as achieving personal, subject, and meta-subject learning outcomes formulated in the federal state educational standards.