Not only is May otherwise undescribed in writing, but it is also the only small Vietic language documented and analysed in such detail, and one of few endangered Austroasiatic languages described so thoroughly.  May is predominantly monosyllabic, yet retains traces of affixes and consonant clusters that reflect older disyllabic forms. It is tonal, and also manifests breathy phonation and vowel ongliding, yielding a remarkable complexity of syllable types. The lexicon, which is extensively documented, has a substantial archaic component. Consequently, the volume provides an invaluable resource for comparative historical and typological studies. 

This volume presents the original text, accompanied by an English translation and commentary, of a hitherto unpublished Syriac composition, entitled the Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands. Produced by an unknown East Syrian Christian author during the late medieval or early modern period, this work offers a loosely organized catalogue of marvellous events, phenomena, and objects, natural as well as human-made, found throughout the world. The Marvels is a unique composition in that it bears witness to the creative adoption by Syriac Christians of the paradoxographical literary mode of ‘aǧā’ib that enjoyed great popularity among their Arabic- and Persian-speaking Muslim neighbours. In this composition, the East Syrian author blends together a number of different paradoxographical traditions: some inherited from the earlier Christian works in Syriac, such as the Alexander Romance, some borrowed directly or indirectly from Muslim geographical and other works, and some, apparently, circulating as a part of local oral lore. Combining entertainment and didacticism, he provides his audience with a fascinating panorama of imaginary geography, which at the same time has unmistakable Christian features.

This edition makes a fascinating Syriac work available to a wider audience, and provides detailed insights into the rich assortment of traditions creatively woven together by its author. Thanks to the combination of the original text, English translation and commentary, it will be of interest to scholars and readers alike.

Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.

In Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran Sergey Minov examines literary and socio-cultural aspects of the Syriac pseudepigraphic composition known as the Cave of Treasures, which offers a peculiar version of the Christian history of salvation. The book fills a lacuna in the history of Syriac Christian literary creativity by contextualising this unique work within the cultural and religious situation of Sasanian Mesopotamia towards the end of Late Antiquity. The author analyses the Cave’s content and message from the perspective of identity theory and memory studies, while discussing its author’s emphatically polemical stand vis-à-vis Judaism, the ambivalent way in which he deals with Iranian culture, and the promotion in this work of a distinctively Syriac-oriented vision of the biblical past.

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.

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

The International conference “Linguistic Forum 2020: Language and Artificial Intelligence” took place in 2020 on November 12-14 in Moscow, Russia. The conference is organized by the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. This conference is part of a series of annual forums initiated by the Institute of Linguistics RAS in 2019. The aim of the 2020 forum is to foster dialogue among researchers working at the interface of linguistics and artificial intelligence including those engaged in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Developments in AI have been responsible for recent advances in natural language generation and comprehension; they have also expanded the boundaries of these technologies’ applicability. Neural networks and dense embeddings have replaced models based on feature engineering and traditional discrete categories of linguistic analysis. As a result, the boundary between fundamental and applied linguistic research is being eroded. Empirical linguistics is taking on board these new technologies, in part, to enable better modelling of language and documentation of data. AI is also increasingly becoming a part of the everyday life of language users. Can fundamental linguistics currently offer technologically viable ideas or methods? These and similar conceptual and methodological problems were the focus of the forum.

The textbook How to Write a Research Article is intended for early-career researchers who are planning to publish their articles in international peer-reviewed journals. They will learn about the conventions of research writing in English and prepare their drafts for publication through a set of guided activities. The textbook also contains strategies and checklists, appendices, supplementary materials, references to useful resources, and answer keys. The textbook is meant for collaborative use in class, but it can be also used independently.

 

Listening is one of the most challenging skills to develop. You need constant exposure to oral texts. This Academic Listening series is intended for self-study. The tasks are based on Oxford University podcasts and are supplemented with reading on a related topic. The exercises are focused on developing such skills as listening for gist and listening for specific details. Listening may be hard at first, but with every task it is going to get better!

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.

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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.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:

The paper tests the hypothesis that the larger the population of language speakers, the smaller the number of second languages mastered by these speakers.

Design/methodology/approach:

We match the size of the population of 29 Dagestanian languages and the number of second languages spoken by the speakers of these languages from 54 villages, and run a Poisson mixed effects regression model that predicts the average number of second languages spoken by speakers from first-language communities of different size.

Data and analysis:

Data for this study comes from two sources. The information on the population of Dagestanian languages is based on the digitalized census of 1926. The information on the number of second languages in which the residents of Dagestan are proficient is taken from the database on multilingualism in Dagestan (4032 people).

Findings/conclusions:

The study supports the hypothesis that the size of language population is negatively correlated with the multilingualism of the language community.

Originality:

The paper is the first to test the correlation between the size of language population and the level of multilingualism of its speakers using statistical methods and a large body of empirical data.

Significance and implications:

Population size is a factor that could have influenced patterns of language evolution. The population is interrelated with other factors, one of which is long-standing multilingualism. The methodological lesson of this research is that there is a difference in the level of multilingualism within a range of populations where the largest was about 120,000 people.

Limitations:

The data is limited to one multilingual region. The revealed correlation probably does not hold for areas where language communities do not interact with their neighbors and even speakers of minority languages can be monolingual, or for the territories where many people migrated and the area where a language is spoken was discontinuous.

This study measured the impact of using TED Talks in a pre-service Business English course on university students’ listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills. The pretest-posttest comparative method with experimental-control groups was used. For the experimental group TED talks were integrated into the course, while for the control group listening and reading texts on the same topic were used. The findings revealed a statistically significant improvement in the experimental group for listening, reading, writing and speaking scores over the control group. In addition, we observed that integrating TED talks in the ESP course improved the students’ spontaneous self-reported learning experience.

This essay proposes to rethink Romanticism through the concept of bliss. I suggest not only that bliss is a core Romantic concept but also, more speculatively, that Romanticism as project and as tendency is generated out of an antagonistic entanglement between bliss and the world of Western modernity. As the state of immediate fulfillment, free of alienation or negativity, bliss is what modernity at once promises and endlessly defers—and so bliss erupts in Romanticism against the modern world. In bliss, the world is dissolved as in water, consumed as in fire, so that nothing remains except the ecstasy of the world’s annihilation or termination. Romanticism seeks to inhabit the utopia of bliss immanently; however, the world re-mediates bliss into a long-lost past or an unreachable future, because it is through this re-mediation that the world reproduces and justifies itself. As a result, Romanticism falls into endless approximation, into nostalgia and longing—and bliss becomes infinitely not-yet, fragmented, defused by the world. This essay moves through German and British Romanticism so as to collect the scattered fragments of bliss, and to re-assemble Romantic bliss in its a-worldly immanence, its post-Copernican cosmic infinity, and its (often violent) clash with the world.

Interaction between people is a cornerstone of being human. Despite huge developments in languages and communicative skills, interaction often fails, which causes problems and costs in everyday life and work. An inability to conduct dialogue also produces conflicts between groups of people, states and religions. Therefore, there are good reasons to claim that miscommunication and failures in interaction are among the most serious problems in the world. Researchers from different fields – linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, brain research, philosophy – have tried to tackle this complex phenomenon. Their method-driven approaches enrich our understanding of the features of interaction in many ways. However, what is lacking is an understanding of the very essence of interaction, which needs a more holistic, phenomenon-driven approach. The aim of this paper is to show that the only way to reach this goal is multidisciplinarity, that is, using the results and methods of different fields of research. This is not an easy goal and task because the way of thinking and doing research varies greatly discipline-wise. A further obstacle is the researchers’ training, which, as a rule, focuses on the tradition of only one field of research. The Multidimensional Model of Interaction provides a good framework for a more holistic approach to interaction by viewing the complex phenomenon from different angles. The model includes various phases of the process of interaction, beginning with the choice of the topic by the speaker and ending with identification of the reference by the recipient, as well as the mental worlds of the interlocutors (knowledge, attitudes, values, emotional state etc.), recipient design (accommodation of speech) and external circumstances.

In this paper we consider 6 Syriac love charms and edit their original text and translation. All but two texts are published here for the first time. This is the first part of our inquiry, in which we consider one of the two types of Syriac love charms, the recipe-type. Among its primary characteristics is its extreme rarity in Syriac magic codices. Another prominent trait of this type, which makes these texts especially valuable, is that some of them contain ritual instructions which are exceedingly rare for Syriac charms as a whole, while others may contain what we call an allusion to it. Our assumption is that texts of this type reflect ancient magic practices originating in pre-Christian time, which are credibly attested in the texts belonging to other magic traditions of the Near East and Egypt.

This paper experimentally investigates the role of veridicality and the cause-effect relation in the derivation of (i) Conditional Perfection and (ii) logical entailment in Russian esli-conditionals and raz-conditionals. It provides further evidence that Conditional Perfection is a structurally defined phenomenon. Moreover, it presents a cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in conditional connectives used in indicative and subjunctive counterfactual conditionals. Finally, confirming the causal network theory proposed in Schulz (2007), the paper points out that effect-to-cause subjunctive counterfactuals are less acceptable than cause-to-effect ones.

The paper reports on two experiments that investigate whether polarity, clause order and incentive influence derivation of Conditional Perfection in two types of inducements (promises and threats). Both experiments are designed as inference tasks, additionally measuring reaction times to inferences. The paper shows that the derivation of Conditional Perfection is endorsed in both types of inducements. However, the negative consequent bias (i.e. higher rates of Conditional Perfection in conditionals with a negative consequent than in conditionals with an affirmative consequent) and the double negation effect (i.e. slowdown of reaction times to Conditional Perfection with a double negation in a consequent) hold for threats, but not for promises. The paper also reveals a parallel double negation effect (i.e. facilitation of Conditional Perfection in conditionals with negation in both clauses) in threats, but not in promises. Last but not least, the paper demonstrates that the effect of clause order and incentive on the derivation of Conditional Perfection is rather moderate. The paper supports the view that the derivation of Conditional Perfection is not effortful (Van Tiel and Schaeken 2016) and has some indirect arguments for treating Conditional Perfection and scalar implicatures as separate phenomena.

The article aims to clarify the relations between the early versions of tale type ATU 575. Examining the range of Chinese accounts concerning various wooden birds, the author concludes that two groups can be distinguished. The first consists of stories about flying wooden kite-like birds that are not used as vehicles, while in the second, we deal with wooden birds that can carry people. Records belonging to the second group and evidently having their origin in Indian and Central Asian folk tradition appear later in China. An attempt is made to restore possible outlines of the tale type’s ancestral stories. The article states that the tale of an enamoured weaver in the Panchatantra evolves from the structure of such an ancestral story. 

Throughout my book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory, I attempt to demonstrate that literature and literary theory have been involved in complex dialectic moves between autonomy and heteronomy. These two poles are perhaps best treated as heuristic tools, which is also how one should read my insistence on literary theory as having its own epistemological identity despite the interplay between aesthetics, philosophy, and cultural theory within which it has functioned. As Bogdana Paskaleva rightly observes, the book is, in a sense, an extended case study of such amalgamations, from within which literary theory emerges as a specific mode of reflection on literature that has its own limited time span (but not necessarily a time-limited impact, as I show in the epilogue to the book). This should cancel concerns about the supposedly unilinear timeframe the book works with: in fact, the narrative traces not only overlapping chronologies but, crucially, overlapping regimes of relevance that operate with different temporalities and zones of validation. This is also true of the presence of politics and issues of power in the book: the entire first part, that on Russian formalism, implicitly and explicitly traces the dual processes of differentiation and accommodation of literary theory vis-.-vis political power, and there is a nod toward this duality also in the brief references to the work of the Prague Circle.

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.

The article analyzes some verbal features in the West Russian Chronicles (XV-XVI 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 very indicative and important for understanding the history of the development of the temporal system in the Russian language. The material of the West Russian chronicles allows to widen the list of contexts with this construction with two more examples. The 2nd part discusses the features of the functioning of pluperfect forms. Rare forms of pluperfect with the linking verb in the aorist form were found in the West Russian Chronicles which is quite unexpected for the late texts. The article discusses possible explanations for this phenomenon. As for the semantics of the pluperfect forms, all of the basic pluperfect meanings are presented in the analyzed Chronicles. The comparison of the number of the contexts with these meanings to the material of the other chronicles allows us to draw a number of conclusions about the history of the pluperfect’s development in the Old Russian language 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.