I. This paper attempts to relate prosodic phenomena, which developed due to the potential ambiguity of the nominative singular and genitive plural endings, which both had zero-endings. Languages to be considered are West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, and Polish) and East Slavic (Russian). I argue that the differentiation of stems preceding the zero-ending was morphological, rather than phonological. It is represented by quantity (or its reflex) in West Slavic, but by accentual paradigms in East Slavic.

 

 

 

Одним из актуальных и активно развивающихся направлений современной лингвистики, напрямую связанным с преподаванием русского языка в иноязычной аудитории, является сбор и систематизация живого речевого материала. Для русского языка главной базой таких лингвистических данных в настоящее время можно считать Национальный корпус как «информационно-справочную систему, основанную на собрании текстов в электронной форме» (см.: http://www.ruscorpora.ru/). Анализ материалов этого Корпуса (равно, впрочем, как и текстов за его пределами) позволяет наблюдать, а затем и учитывать в ходе преподавания, многие любопытные процессы, происходящие в нашем языке, а зачастую и проследить их в историческом развитии.

 

 

 

Russian language mavens commonly look with disdain to the contemporary mass media as the main cause of what they perceive to be the pollution (ogrjaznenie) or distortion (iskazhenie) of the “great and mighty” national tongue. From the infusion of vulgarity and foreign loans to the near viral spread of “albanskij jazyk” (or “jazyk padonkov”, e.g. prived, krosavcheg, afftar), both old and new media have been tagged by many as a wholly negative influence on post-Soviet Russian language culture. This paper challenges this common assumption by examining one media-based response to the “linguistic lawlessness” (jazykovoj bespredel) that has come to be associated with the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

 

 

The talk examines the language specifics and social implications of the prevalent Russian internet slang, the "Olbanian" language of the so-called "падонкaфф." Disregarding the fundamental principles of Russian orthography, spelling, and even morphology, the Olbanian language users have created an idiom that seemingly allows a complete freedom of writing. Yet, the spelling of the word подонков itself as well as the rendition of the popular Russian children rhyme in (1) suggest that the slang's basic organizational principle is "Write as you speak:"

 

 

 

Recently, there have been several attempts to draw parallels and analyze the relationship between political and economical changes in modern Russia and linguistic modifications in speech of contemporary mass-media (Volodina 2003, Kostomarov 1999). Internet and other technological novelties that have become part of everyday activity indisputably have impact on the linguistic style of modern radio and television programs (Alexandrova 2003). They have lead to the appearance of new genres and changes in linguistic manners of broadcasting.

 

 

Ever since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) published Metaphors We Live By, metaphor has played a major role in cognitive linguistics, while metonymy has received less attention. However, a vivid debate in 2006 (Peirsman and Geeraerts 2006, Croft 2006) testifies to a renewed interest in metonymy, thus raising the question as to how metaphor and metonymy interact in grammatical systems. The goal of this paper is to shed light on this question on the basis of an analysis of prototypical and non-prototypical meanings of the imperfective and perfective aspects in Russian. It is argued that metaphor and metonymy are both pervasive in the category of aspect, and that metaphor motivates the basic meanings of the aspects, while metonymy provides conceptual links between various subcategories.

 

 

 

Some students of Russian have concluded that American and Russian cultures see the world differently. Americans have a positive, optimistic, outer-directed (confident) outlook, while Russians have a sullen, pessimistic, inner-directed (protective, defensive) outlook. This view finds support in the plethora of negatives in the Russian language. Russian culture seems bound by nay-saying. Such conclusions are short-sighted. In my paper, I will argue that linguistic negation in Russian is not necessarily a manifestation of negative judgment. On the contrary, many Russian expressions that are grammatically and syntactically wrapped in negatives are far removed from negative feeling. I will examine negatives in three common social displays.

 

 

 

В докладе представлены результаты психосемантического анализа семантики слов, обозначающих КРА, в русском языке. Цель исследования – выявить признаки, дифференциирующие близкие по смыслу лексемы, путем анализа представления носителей языка о характере каждого их них. Объект анализа – слова комплимент, похвала, лесть, поздравление. Методы анализа - психосемантическое шкалирование (по принципу Осгуда), которое позволяет вскрыть неосознаваемые уровни восприятия семантика исследуемых слов-объектов, и факторный анализ. Инструментом анализа является совокупность шкал из 26 признаков, название которых были сформулированы на основе словарных дефиниций, суждений о комплименте, высказанные респондентами в анкетах и в последующих беседах. Участниками эксперимента были 50 российских женщин и мужчин в возрасте 18-23 лет.

 

 

 

According to grammars of Russian Church Slavonic there are three primary past tenses: the imperfect, the aorist, and the perfect. The imperfect is typically described as the tense that provides backgrounding, the aorist as the tense that sequences events or recounts vivid events, and the perfect as the tense used for retrospective viewpoints of the speaker which result in objectivizing the signified process (Alipi 2001: 335). In this paper services from the 19th century Russian Church Slavonic Menaion are examined to determine degrees of correspondence to standard descriptive grammars. This paper shows that designations of tense function have little to do with Church Slavonic as it has developed in the Russian tradition, and instead suggests that tense descriptions have been based largely on Old Church Slavonic descriptive grammars.

 

 

 

This paper consists of an analysis of correlations between the accentuation types of Common Slavic (CSl) deverbatives and the original CSl and IE verbs. The CSl deverbatives analyzed in this work are all masculine nouns, which are grouped into one of the four accentual Slavic paradigms, AP-A, AP-B, AP-C, and AP-D (Dybo et al. 1990, 1993, Shrager 2007). Within the analysis, the original verbs are grouped according to the auslaut of the CSl verbal stem in the present tense, i.e. liquids, nasals, j-stems, vowels, etc. (as in Dybo 2000). The comparison of the verbs and the deverbatives shows that verbal stems that in CSl have dominant roots, form deverbatives that have either AP-A, -B or -D; verbal stems with recessive roots form deverbatives that have AP-C. Thus, these findings demonstrate a direct type of correlation for most of the groups. Moreover, the results of this analysis serve an additional proof of the dominant accentuation of the AP-D.