Despite the fact that culture, aesthetics, and art were some of the main concerns of early classical sociology (e.g., Simmel’s essays are probably the most popular reference in this regard), later culture has become a matter of interest of a sub-discipline, that of the sociology of culture. The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries brought a radical transformation of sociological understanding of culture, and it was Jeffrey Alexander who revived the notion and proposed a new understanding of sociological theory drawn on this notion. According to Alexander, culture should be treated as an autonomous realm being able to act and contribute to the social order. In (re)turning to this understanding, Alexander draws upon a variety of now-classical theories, but mainly on Durkheim’s theory of religion as explicated in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Clifford Geertz and his idea of thick description is one of the sources for the renewed cultural sociology. In Art as a Cultural System (1976), he wrote that “to study an art form is to explore a sensibility” and “such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep”. The special issue of the RSR is dedicated to empirical and theoretical discussion of how art can serve as a source of sociological imagination. 

This issue of the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik is comprising the full papers of the international symposium on Gothic language, history and culture “The Goths Compared: East Germanic communities between Balticum, Pontus and the West” which was held on November 5–6, 2019 at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (hse) in Moscow. The symposium was organised by the Centre for Medieval Studies, HSE.

Game of Business is a textbook designed to upgrade speaking, reading, listening and writing skills of bachelor and master students in professional business English discourse. It can be used in a variety of Management programs, in groups of upper-intermediate to advanced levels. It is centered around the topic of start-ups and addresses a range of issues related to establishing a business in four different industries - Tourism, Arts & Culture, Food & Beverages and Sports.

The textbook focuses on developing speech skills such as writing and speaking by building up a vocabulary within given topics with the highest frequency in the IELTS exam. The proposed texts and exercises form and consolidate the ability of students to speak and write on given topics in the style of scientific discourse. The book can be used as a textbook for individual and group learning acivities, in the classroom and as a self-study, to improve English up to B2, C2, C2, and to achieve higher scores on the IELTS International Exam.

Akkadian, the oldest surviving Semitic language and one of the most important Ancient Near Eastern languages, is one of the best documented languages of the ancient world. This nine volume encyclopedic set presents a detailed compendium of Akkadian vocabulary that will prove a vital resource for students and scholars of language, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and all those with a wider interest in Akkadian writings.

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra , refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fi ction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fi ction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen— to musical words and worlds.

he Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages. This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.

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The volume is devoted to the typology of the category of number in the world's languages.

The volume includes chapters devoted to various aspects of Caucasian languages.

The title of the book refers to the sociological survey, conducted by the "Public opinion" Fund in 2000. It is focused on the representation of Internet as a complex phenomenon in modern Russia. First, the Internet is considered as part of the media system that not only rapidly developing, but also significantly transforming the system as a whole. Second, it contains the analysis of main online markets in Russia. Thirdly, the Internet is analyzed in political, social and cultural contexts.

The textbook focuses on developing speech skills such as writing and speaking by building up a vocabulary within given topics with the highest frequency in the IELTS exam. The proposed texts and exercises form and consolidate the ability of students to speak and write on given topics in the style of scientific discourse. The book can be used as a textbook for individual and group learning acivities, in the classroom and as a self-study, to improve English up to B2, C2, C2, and to achieve higher scores on the IELTS International Exam.

This pioneering volume explores the Arctic as an important and highly endangered archive of knowledge about natural as well as human history of the anthropocene.

Focusing on the Arctic as an archive means to investigate it not only as a place of human history and memory – of Arctic exploring, ›conquering‹ and colonizing –, but to take into account also the specific environmental conditions of the circumpolar region: ice and permafrost. These have allowed a huge natural archive to emerge, offering rich sources for natural scientists and historians alike.

Examining the debate on the notion of (›natural‹) archive, the cultural semantics and historicity of the meaning of concepts like ›warm‹, ›cold‹, ›freezing‹ and ›melting‹ as well as various works of literature, art and science on Arctic topics, this volume brings together literary scholars, historians of knowledge and philosophy, art historians, media theorists and archivologists.

The book includes 64 papers submitted to the International conference in computer linguistics and intellectual technologies Dialogue 2019 and presents a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied research of natural language description, language simulation, and creation of applied computer technologies.

The book‘s main objective is developing academic writing and speaking skills, namely teaching students to write a proposal of their research and to orally present its conception. The book is mainly intended for undergraduate and graduate students of the faculty of law of Higher School of Economics. ―Project Proposal Guide: How to Write and Present (Law Disciplines)‖ is divided into three parts. The first part is theoretical and explains characteristics of the genre of project proposal. The second part ―Writing a project proposal‖ contains eight chapters, each devoted to a particular part of an academic paper (abstract, introduction, literature review etc.). The third part ―Oral presentation of a project proposal‖ consists of two units devoted to PowerPoint and poster presentations, correspondingly. The book is also provided with additional materials: a questionnaire that enables students to evaluate their level of academic skills development and samples of projects‘ chapters with analysis.

The book can be used both in class and individually.

Language policy and usage in the post-communist region have continually attracted wide political, media, and expert attention since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. How are these issues politicized in contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine? This study presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017. The most notable difference observed between Ukraine and the two Baltic countries is that many Russian-writing users in Ukraine’s internet tend to support the position that the state language, i.e. Ukrainian, is discriminated against and needs special protection by the state, whereas the majority of the Russian-speaking commentators on selected Estonian and Latvian news websites advocate for introducing Russian as a second state language. Despite attempts of Ukraine’s government to Ukrainize public space, the position of Ukrainian is still perceived, even by many Russian-writing commentators and bloggers, as being ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’. This became especially visible in debates after the Revolution of Dignity, when the number of supporters of the introduction of Russian as second state language significantly decreased. In the Russian-language sector of Estonian and Latvian news websites and blogs, in contrast, the majority of online users continually reproduce the image of ‘victims’ of nation-building. They often claim that their political, as well as economic rights, are significantly limited in comparison to ethnic Estonians and Latvians. The results of Maksimovtsova’s research illustrate that, notwithstanding differences between the Estonian as well as Latvian cases, on the one hand, and Ukraine, on the other, there is an ongoing process of convergence of debates in Ukraine to those held in the other two countries analyzed in terms of an increased degree of ‘discursive decommunization’ and ‘derussification’.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gapping dataset for Russian that consists of 7.5k sentences with gapping (as well as 15k relevant negative sentences) and comprises data from various genres: news, fiction, social media and technical texts. The dataset was prepared for the Automatic Gapping Resolution Shared Task for Russian (AGRR-2019) - a competition aimed at stimulating the development of NLP tools and methods for processing of ellipsis. In this paper, we pay special attention to the gapping resolution methods that were introduced within the shared task as well as an alternative test set that illustrates that our corpus is a diverse and representative subset of Russian language gapping sufficient for effective utilization of machine learning techniques.

This study examined the online exchanges of 28 pre-service foreign language teachers (14 in Russia, 14 in the US) as they discussed in English their opinions about cultural products, practices, and perspectives, and their study abroad experiences via voice-based telecollaboration. Informed by intercultural competence frameworks, a qualitative analysis of participants’ oral exchanges revealed six intercultural learning moves performed by participants in order to develop their own and/or others’ intercultural competence during interaction. A follow-up analysis of the intercultural learning moves that emerged in response to five purposefully selected discussion question prompts suggested that one prompt type—i.e. a combined Brainstorm + Reflection Question on Cultural Experiences—encouraged participants to make a higher number and a wider range of high-level intercultural learning moves. The study concluded with guidelines for developing discussion question prompts that are likely to promote the emergence of advanced intercultural learning moves via telecollaboration with global partners.

The editorial introduction outlines the theoretical framework of the special issue by indicating main ideas that shape the research agenda. Alexander Filippov and Nail Farkhatdinov provide the grounds for the cultural sociological understanding of the arts and literature in relation to the problems of sociological knowledge. The editorial is completed with the overview of the contributions. 

Handedness is the most prominent trait of functional asymmetry in humans, associated with lateralized cognitive functions and considered in relation to mental disorders. However, the neuroanatomical correlates of handedness are still unclear. It has been hypothesized that the structural properties of sub-regions of the corpus callosum (CC) are linked to handedness. Nevertheless, tractography studies of the relation between directly measured structural properties of CC subregions and handedness are lacking. The Constrained Spherical Deconvolution (CSD) approach enables full reconstruction of the sub-regions of the CC. The current study aimed to investigate the relation between the structural properties of the CC, such as volume and the CSD metric, referred to as hindrance modulated orientational anisotropy (HMOA), and handedness. Handedness was considered in two dimensions: direction (right-handed, ambidextrous, left-handed) and degree (the absolute values of Handedness quotient). We found no association between 1) volume or HMOA as a proxy of microstructural properties, namely the axonal diameter and fiber dispersion, of each sub-region and 2) either the direction or the degree of handedness. These findings suggest the absence of a direct relation between sub-regions of the CC and handedness, demonstrating the necessity of future tractography studies.

The current research answers the question how Twitter users express their evaluation of the topical social problem (explicitly or implicitly) and what linguistic means they use being restricted by the limited length of the message. The  article explores how Twitter users socialize with each other and exchange ideas on social issues of great importance, express their feelings using a number of linguistic means while being limited to a fixed number of characters and form solidarity being geographically distant from each other. The research is focused on the linguistic tools employed by Twitter users to express their personal attitudes to migration processes in Europe and the USA. The aim of the current investigation is to determine the correlation between the attitudes of English-speaking users towards migration and the way they are expressed (implicitly or explicitly). The authors attempted to define which tools contributed to implicit or explicit nature of the utterances. The research is based on the content analysis of 100 tweets of English-speaking users collected from February, 1 to July, 31 2017 and done through the program Atlas.ti. The software performs coding of textual units, counting the frequency of codes and their correlation. The choice of the period is defined by significant events in Trump’s migration policy and its consequences. The results of the research show that Twitter users tend to express critical attitudes towards migration rather than approve of it or sympathize with migrants. Criticism is more often expressed implicitly rather than explicitly. In order to disguise the attitude and feelings the English-speaking users of Twitter employed irony, questions and quotations, while imperative structures were used to declare attitudes explicitly. It is also worth mentioning that ellipsis, contractions and abbreviations were used quite frequently which is due to the word limit of tweets. Even though people have an opportunity to send messages anonymously they still tend to imply their negative attitude towards political authorities. At the same time, the lack of knowledge about extralinguistic factors and personal characteristics of users makes the process of interpretation of tweets rather challenging. The findings of the current research suggest the necessity to take into account implicit negative attitudes while carrying out the analysis of public opinion on Twitter.

Background: Languages of the world have several ways of expressing time reference. Many languages such as those in the Indo-European group express time reference through tense. Languages such as Chinese and Standard Indonesian express time reference through aspectual adverbs, while Akan does so through grammatical tone. Previous studies have found that time reference is selectively impaired, with reference to the past being more impaired than reference to the non-past. The PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH) posits that pastime reference is difficult because it requires discourse linking.

Aims: The goal of this study was first to examine whether pastime reference is impaired also in languages that do not use grammatical affixes but rather tone, to make time reference. Second, this study aims to decouple the effect of tone from the effect of temporal reference on Akan verbs.

Method and Procedures: Ten Akan agrammatic speakers and 10 non-brain-damaged speakers (NBDs) participated in this study. An Akan adapted version of the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (African TART), for both production and comprehension was used. The TART focuses on the future, present (habitual) and the pastime frames. Additionally, five of the agrammatic speakers performed two tonal discrimination tasks: a non-linguistic and a linguistic (lexical) one.

Outcomes and Results: While the NBDs scored at ceiling, the agrammatic speakers made errors, and these affected past more than present and the future time references, in both comprehension and production tasks. However, the comprehension data showed a dissociation between the present habitual and the future. The substitution error analysis revealed a preference for the present. The five agrammatic speakers showed an intact performance on non-linguistic tonal discrimination task.

Conclusion: The conclusion is that regardless of how time reference is expressed, whether through inflectional morphology or grammatical tone, reference to the past is problematic for individuals with agrammatic aphasia. The fact that the agrammatic speakers could perceive the non-linguistic tonal differences demonstrates that it is not tone in general that is disrupted, but rather time reference, particularly reference to the past, as predicted by the PADILIH.

Background

It has been demonstrated that reference to the past is difficult for individuals with agrammatic aphasia, leading to the formulation of the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH). Many of the previous studies have focused on Indo-European languages, in which time reference is expressed through verb inflection. The current study examined the PADILIH in Thai, a language that does not use verb inflection but instead uses aspectual markers to refer to time.

Aims

We aimed to evaluate the pattern of impairment of time reference in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia, by investigating how grammatical reference to past, present, and future was processed.

Methods and Procedures

A total of 15 Thai agrammatic speakers and 18 Thai non-brain-damaged (NBD) speakers participated in a sentence production task and an auditory sentence-to-picture matching comprehension task, both of which probed past, present, and future time reference.

Outcomes and Results

While the NBD participants performed close to ceiling in both production and comprehension, the agrammatic speakers showed significantly more difficulty in conditions requiring reference to the future in both modalities. In production, however, the agrammatic speakers replaced the target future time reference construction with negation (a construction that can be used as an alternative means for future reference). When responses using negation were counted as correct, the individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed equal impairment across conditions.

Conclusions

The results of this study were inconsistent with the PADILIH predictions: Thai agrammatic speakers experienced more vulnerability in reference to the future than the present and the past. This suggested that impairments of time reference may differ depending on the structure of the language. We hypothesized that the problems with producing future time reference in Thai may be influenced by the grammatical status of the future marker. In addition, the use of negation in place of the target word might have been because this negative construction reduces the processing load for Thai agrammatic speakers.

Purpose

Corpus analyses of spontaneous language fragments of varying length provide useful insights in the language change caused by brain damage, such as caused by some forms of dementia. Sample size is an important experimental parameter to consider when designing spontaneous language analyses studies. Sample length influences the confidence levels of analyses. Machine learning approaches often favor to use as much language as available, whereas language evaluation in a clinical setting is often based on truncated samples to minimize annotation labor and to limit any discomfort for participants. This article investigates, using Bayesian estimation of machine learned models, what the ideal text length should be to minimize model uncertainty.

Method

We use the Stanford parser to extract linguistic variables and train a statistic model to distinguish samples by speakers with no brain damage from samples by speakers with probable Alzheimer's disease. We compare the results to previously published models that used CLAN for linguistic analysis.

Results

The uncertainty around six individual variables and its relation to sample length are reported. The same model with linguistic variables that is used in all three experiments can predict group membership better than a model without them. One variable (concept density) is more informative when measured using the Stanford tools than when measured using CLAN.

Conclusion

For our corpus of German speech, the optimal sample length is found to be around 700 words long. Longer samples do not provide more information.

Background: The distribution of pronouns varies cross-linguistically. This distribution has led to conflicting results in studies that investigated pronoun resolution in agrammatic indviduals. In the investigation of pronominal resolution, the linguistic phenomenon of “resumption” is understudied in agrammatism. The construction of pronominal resolution in Akan presents the opportunity to thoroughly examine resumption.

Aims: To start, the present study examines the production of (pronominal) resumption in Akan focus constructions (who-questions and focused declaratives). Second, we explore the effect of grammatical tone on the processing of pronominal (resumption) since Akan is a tonal language.

Methods & Procedures: First, we tested the ability to distinguish linguistic and non-linguistic tone in Akan agrammatic speakers. Then, we administered an elicitation task to five Akan agrammatic individuals, controlling for the structural variations in the realization of resumption: focused who-questions and declaratives with (i) only a resumptive pronoun, (ii) only a clause determiner, (iii) a resumptive pronoun and a clause determiner co-occurring, and (iv) neither a resumptive pronoun nor a clause determiner.

Outcomes & Results: Tone discrimination both for pitch and for lexical tone was unimpaired. The production task demonstrated that the production of resumptive pronouns and clause determiners was intact. However, the production of declarative sentences in derived word order was impaired; wh-object questions were relatively well-preserved.

Conclusions: We argue that the problems with sentence production are highly selective: linguistic tones and resumption are intact but word order is impaired in non-canonical declarative sentences.

Several studies have shown selective deficits in the production and comprehension of verb forms referring to the past. On the basis of this evidence the Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis (Bastiaanse et al., 2011) suggests that individuals with aphasia have difficulties with verb forms referring to the past, in comparison to non-past forms such as the present and the future. However, many studies provide counterevidence. This study presents a review of the literature and addresses the question of dissociation between the past and the non-past in aphasia in Greek, a language which distinguishes among three past forms. A mixed group of eight individuals with aphasia and a group of 10 non-brain-damaged speakers performed the two tasks of the Greek version of the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (Bastiaanse, Jonkers, & Thompson, 2008): a sentence completion task (primed by pictures) and a sentence-picture matching task. The sentence completion task tested the present, future and three past tenses: past perfective, past imperfective and present perfect. The sentence-picture matching task tested past perfective, present and future. The production data provide evidence for a deficit in the reference to the past but they also suggest difficulties with the future. Interestingly, a dissociation among the three past tenses tested was found. Above chance performance was found in comprehension across tenses. We consider possible accounts of the data and we discuss the implications of these findings for the Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis.

This paper focuses on semantics and syntax of two attributivizers in Kazym Khanty. Both of the attributivizers have proprietive semantics and attach to a small nominal rather than a full DP. Proprietives are not completely interchangeable, therefore the difference between them is also explored in this paper. Moreover, we are going to show that both attributivizers significantly differ from cases. However, adjectives derived by proprietive markers differ from regular adjectives, as well.

Over the last 30 years Pridnestrovie, a newly independent state in the post-Soviet space, has remained one of the few countries in the world where the Russian language still enjoys its official status and privileged people’s attitudes. This article aims to explain what the origins of this state of affairs are. First, it looks at the history of the region in the 19th century when these territories became Russian, and the community of people from different ethnic backgrounds that Pridnestrovie represents now was initially formed. Then, some changes in terms of territories and language policy, that occurred during the Soviet period, and the impact they had on the contemporary history of the region are considered. After that, the study focuses on several important pieces of the language legislation of Pridnestrovie that secures linguistic pluralism in the country, and further it discusses current language situation in the republic paying special attention to the role of Russian in maintaining the inter-ethnic peace. Finally, the findings revealed in the first part of the study are proved by the results of the questionnaire that asked its participant to express their opinion on the linguistic situation in the republic and tell about their attitudes towards the Russian language and its main function in Pridnestrovie.  

This paper shows that Northern Khanty -en [POSS.2SG] is used in several contexts beyond the proper possessive ones. It behaves quite differently in anaphoric uses and in uses in commands. There are at least three distinct markers with the exponent -en. First, the usual 2SG possessive -en which competes with other possessives and depends in number features on the addressee—if the addressee is plural, the marker is accordingly -ən [POSS.2NSG]. Semantically, it corresponds to Karvovskaya’s (2018) MinSpec operator. Secondly, the salient article -en. It is used with unique objects in commands. It states of a referent of an NP that the referent stands in a SALIENT_TO relation to the addressee. Should the addressee be plural, the exponent is accordingly -ən [POSS.2NSG]. Thirdly, the anaphoric article -en, used with anaphorically accessible unique referents. Semantically it is equivalent to Schwarz’s (2009) strong definite article.

The paper explores the first translations of W. H. Auden into Russian in the context of the cultural projects of the Stalinist USSR in the 1930s. With ideological distinctions across the borders sometimes even more perceptible than linguistic, the translation was bound to be cultural as well as intralingual. The poetry of the “early Auden,” an acknowledged modernist and successor to T. S. Eliot, was enigmatic in densely modernist sense and characterized by acute social awareness at the same time. In translating Auden’s controversial poetic persona, reviewers and editors of periodicals and the editor and translators of the Anthology of New English Poetry chose different strategies: while the former discussed a “revolutionary poet,” the latter attempted to translate the modernist. Juxtaposing these two facets of the Russian Auden, the paper proceeds to analyze the translations of the anthology and to demonstrate how D. S. Mirsky, the compiler and editor of the book mediated Auden’s reception in the USSR.

This paper describes numerals in Rutul (Lezgic, East Caucasian). The data presented here were collected during fieldwork in the village of Kina (Rutul district, Republic of Dagestan, Russia) in 2016 to 2019.

The paper provides a description of nominal inflection in Kina Rutul, a variety of the Rutul language (< Lezgic < Nakh Daghestanian). The description is based on three concepts of paradigmatic classification: class of inflectional equivalence, inflectional type and paradigmatic effect. Class of inflectional equivalence describes main patterns of concatenation between root, case / number exponents and stem formatives. Inflectional type is responsible for the description of more subtle differencies within classes of inflection equivalence (morphological irregularities and / or non-concatenative morphophonology). These differencies are generalized over different inflectional types by means of paradigmatic effect.

This paper presents a description of three classes of lexemes in Kina Rutul (Lezgic, East Caucasian): spatial adverbs, adverbial postpositions and postpositions proper. These classes overlap in majority of East Caucasian languages. I suggest criteria of distinguishing these classes of lexemes from each other. The description includes inflection of the lexemes, their etymology and syntactic properties.

The paper proposes a linguistic approach to studying code-switching IT discourse of Moscovian IT specialists. The topic is of special interest since nowadays code-switching dominates in a number of professional spheres such as informational technologies, marketing and telecommunications. It also becomes a new language for the modern generation and moreover, a necessary tool for establishing contacts and demonstrating community affiliation. This new code exists not only within workplaces but also beyond them, that is why the aim is to provide a thorough linguistic and functional description on this topic. Also, there is an in-depth research into how IT discourse shapes Russian digital language on the whole. The methodology used for research is the Matrix Language Frame Model by C.Myers-Scotton (1993). The language units, which are represented by code-switches, are also analyzed in terms of their syntactic, morphological features and pragmatic functions.

The paper presents the first description of the verb paradigm in Kina Rutul, a single-village variety of the Rutul language (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian) spoken in southern Daghestan. First, I make a distinction between the stative verbs with a reduced paradigm and morphologically canonical verbs with a fuller paradigm. I present the inventory and the paradigm of statives, some of which play a key role in the derivation of periphrastic forms. For canonical verbs, I describe all the synthetic forms derived from the three main stems, namely the perfective stem, the imperfective stem and the infinitive stem (the imperative/optative forms lie outside the scope of the paper). Then I analyse the structure of periphrastic forms, which are composed of a non-finite form and an auxiliary.

The present study sought to test the hypothesis that the production of speech and the comprehension of speech in the left temporal lobe can be anatomically disassociated. Moreover, it is aimed to show that the standard intraoperative object naming task is not sufficient to test all the functionally essential areas in the left temporal lobe. In the introductory part of the article we described the existing information about the left temporal lobe and the awake surgery procedure.  In the course of the study, we collected and analyzed the data from intraoperative brain mapping of 25 patients with brain lesions – gliomas or pharmacoresistant epilepsy, who underwent awake craniotomy. All the patient went through intraoperative language mapping with the use of direct electrical stimulation. In order to map language production and comprehension modalities, in addition to the classical object naming task we used an additional task, the phonological judgment task. The results showed substantial dissociation between mapping of two tasks. According to these findings, we can conclude that the object naming task alone is not suitable for adequate brain mapping of the left temporal cortex. The same dissociation may be regarded as an argument in favor of the anatomical dissociation of the production and comprehension of speech in the left temporal cortex.

This article analyzes some verbal features in the West Russian Chronicles (WRC) (15–16th cc.). The 1st part examines contexts with the construction “быти + participle in -ъш- / -въш-”. This construction is extremely uncommon for Old Russian texts, nevertheless the very possibility of its use is important for understanding the history of the development of the temporal system in Russian. The material of WRC allows us to widen the list of contexts with this construction with two more examples. The 2nd part discusses the functions of pluperfect forms. Rare forms of pluperfect with the linking verb in the aorist form are found in WRC which is quite unexpected for a late text. This article discusses possible explanations for this phenomenon. As for the semantics of the pluperfect forms, all of the basic pluperfect meanings are presented in WRC. The comparison of the contexts with these meanings with the material of the other chronicles allows us to draw a number of conclusions about the history of the pluperfect’s development in Old Russian and its dialects.

Both linguistic (e.g., words, syntax) and extralinguistic (e.g., voice quality) information needs to be considered by interlocutors during linguistic communication. The effects of extralinguistic information on neural sentence processing are particularly poorly understood. Here, we used EEG and passive non-attend design with visual distraction in order to investigate how extralinguistic information affects brain activity during syntactic processing. We collected ERPs while participants listened to Russian pronoun-verb phrases recorded in either male or female voice. We manipulated congruency between the grammatical gender signaled by the verb’s ending and the speaker’s apparent gender. We registered both early and late phrase processing signatures in the incongruent conditions including ELAN (peaking at ~150 ms) and N400. Our data suggest a high degree of automaticity in integrating extralinguistic information during syntactic processing indicating existence of a rapid automatic syntactic integration mechanism sensitive to both linguistic and extralinguistic information.

This study presents a surveyofthe formation of thecollection of Nikolai PetrovichLikhachev (1862-1936), a great collectorand Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, through his life and research interests. This collection was unique for Russia at that time. As a researcher and a collector, Likhachev laid the foundations for the professional study of watermarks and paper studies, medieval diplomatics and sigillography, scholarly art history (in the sphere of icons) in Russia. The Museum of Palaeographycreated by Likhachev included rich material on the history of writing in Europe, Asia, North America and the European colonies of the New World, encompassing a wide chronological period -from the turn of the 4-3 millennia BC to the beginning of the 20th century. His collectionshapedthe schools of the Russian and Soviet Egyptology, Assyriology, Hellenic and Medieval studies, Arabic studies, Byzantine studies, and Slavic studies. The present paper is a contribution to the studies of both his activity as a scholar and an antiquarian,and the shaping of his collection.

The article focuses on cases when the length of the constituent is relevant for Russian syntax and leads to ungrammaticality or partial acceptability of some structures. The list of phenomena under consideration includes ‘one-word restrictions’; differences between complement clauses of matrix verbs in indicative vs. imperative,  include constructions with ‘predicatives’, special properties of nominalizations, structures with short embedded clauses, and so on. I show that the ‘length restrictions’ are in fact of different nature: some are related to discourse factors (deictic / non-deictic semantics, discourse coherence, imperative addressee orientation), while others are related to parsing needs (grammatical units are typically shorter than lexical ones, main clauses are more explicit than embedded ones). Another feature of length restrictions is that they are never holistic / integral: the particular rule usually holds for a particular type of structure, not for the whole domain of syntax (this is what makes our data different from purely syntactic restrictions, such as c-command requirements and island restrictions, which often cover a broad set of constructions and grammatical contexts).

The paper discusses the linguistic architecture of conflicts occuring in present-day social media. It addresses both the sociology of a conflicts as well as the linguistic means used by the two parties to obtain a communicative victory.

In Russian, there are many ways to address a person by name. For instance, a man called Aleksandr may be addressed as Aleksandr, Aleksandr Ivanovič, Saša, Sašen′ka, Saška, Sanja, etc. This study aims at analyzing the use of various strategies of naming the listener throughout the last two centuries. It uses the data from the Russian National Corpus to establish the direction of change in address patterns and combines a statistical approach with a manual inspection of selected examples.

Voice onset time (VOT) is a parameter which distinguishes the way consonants are articulated . This parameter is widely used in acoustic phonetics. In particular, there are many studies of it in the languages of the world. This paper presents an analysis of VOT in the Abaza language (Northwest Caucasian). We measured the VOT of plain consonants and ejectives, extracted annotated values and performed mixed effects regression showing the influence of  the place of articulation and phonation type on VOT values.

Phasal polarity (PhP) is a cross-linguistic category which includes such values as ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ, ɴᴏᴛ ʏᴇᴛ, sᴛɪʟʟ and ɴᴏ ʟᴏɴɢᴇʀ. This paper discusses morphologically bound markers of phasal polarity in Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. We show that the Abaza PhP affixes ‑χ’a ‘already’, -s (+ negation) ‘not yet’, -rḳʷa ‘still’ and -χ (+ negation) ‘no longer’ are partly incorporated into the TAM system and that for at least some of them it is unclear whether they belong to the domain of phasal polarity or the phasal domain in a narrow sense (i.e. including values ʙᴇɢɪɴ, ᴄᴏɴᴛɪɴᴜᴇ, etc.). We also present some preliminary data concerning the obligatoriness of Abaza PhP markers and their frequencies in texts.