The book is devoted to qualifying parts of speech: adjective and adverb.

The book is devoted to linguistic problems of professional information exchange among specialists of various fields. 

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

Scandinavian motifs, both religious and related to arts and crafts, are typically deprived of their religious content in the process of Christianization as percieved in Old Rus' literature in which myths are treated as faded histories or legends.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

This edited collection presents a range of methods that can be used to analyse linguistic data quantitatively. A series of case studies of Russian data spanning different aspects of modern linguistics serve as the basis for a discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in linguistic data analysis. The book presents current trends in quantitative linguistics, evaluates methods and presents the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapters contain introductions to the methods and relevant references for further reading.

The Russian language, despite being one of the most studied in the world, until recently has been little explored quantitatively. After a burst of research activity in the years 1960-1980, quantitative studies of Russian vanished. They are now reappearing in an entirely different context. Today we have large and deeply annotated corpora available for extended quantitative research, such as the Russian National Corpus, ruWac, RuTenTen, to name just a few (websites for these and other resources will be found in a special section in the References). The present volume is intended to fill the lacuna between the available data and the methods that can be applied to studying them.

Our goal is to present current trends in researching Russian quantitative linguistics, to evaluate the research methods vis-à-vis Russian data, and to show both the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods. We especially encouraged our authors to focus on evaluating statistical methods and new models of analysis. New findings concern applicability, evaluation, and the challenges that arise from using quantitative approaches to Russian data.

This book explores how artistic strategies of resistance have survived under the conservative-authoritarian regime which has been in place in Russia since 2012. It discusses the conditions under which artists work as the state spells out a new state cultural policy, aesthetics change and the state attempts to define what constitutes good taste. It examines the approaches artists are adopting to resist state oppression and to question the present system and attitudes to art. The book addresses a wide range of issues related to these themes, considers the work of individual artists and includes besides its focus on the visual arts also some discussion of contemporary theatre. The book is interdisciplinary: its authors include artists, art historians, theatre critics, historians, linguists, sociologists and political scientists from Russia, Europe and the United States.

This book aims at developing reserahc writing skills of students. The two key genres of an empirical research paper and a research proposal are used as a basis to develop researcg communication skills. 

The book is intended primarily for the first year undergraduate students but can be also recommended for students of other levels and adults who would like to improve their pronunciation and review the basics of the English grammar. Its main objective is complex revision and development of the student’s knowledge of English phonetics and morphology (group of nominal parts of speech) in order to advance both receptive (listening, reading) and productive (speaking, writing) skills. The Level of English before starting the course is supposed to be not lower than A2-B1 according to the CEFR.

The book contains seven chapters, each devoted to a separate topic, and can be logically divided into two main parts: phonetics (Chapter I) and morphology (Chapters II – VII). All chapters include theoretical part and exercises that are aimed at both recognizing the studied linguistic phenomenon (on its own and within short contexts) and using it. The exercises comprise such tasks as matching words with their definitions, multiple choice, completing sentences with appropriate words, matching parts of sentences, translating, analyzing sentences and texts, creating one’s own texts. The chapters of the book can be studied in any order.

The presentation of linguistic theory is based on the classic and recent books by Russian and foreign scholars. The priority was given to Russian books as taking into consideration the background and typical problems of Russian learners of the English language. The illustrative examples and material for exercises comes from a variety of sources (fiction, encyclopedic and media resources, academic journals, monolingual English dictionaries) in order to demonstrate how the studied linguistic units function in different contexts and text genres.

This training manual is addressed to students of higher education institutions, whose level of English is B2 – C1 according to CEFR and whose course of studies requires writing and defending Research Project Proposal in English. The book is aimed at building and development of Academic skills in oral speech considered necessary for the defense of the Project Proposal of Graduate Qualification Work. Specific feature of the manual is considering new forms of communication, namely giving presentation speech in English. The texts and tasks of the manual envisages forming the skills of designing and performing academic  presentations on professinal topics as well as developing  soft skills, which are recognised as a significant constituent of  graduates' professional competency. The training guide contains exercises for both  inclass  and out-of- class work, including the use of the Internet.

The article at hand aims to demonstrate the development of internationalloanword adaptation in Early Modern Hebrew based on Hebrew presspublished in Russia during the period from the 1860s to the 1910s. In theperiod, various languages from both Eastern and Western Europe wereenriched by internationalisms. For Hebrew, the challenge was even morecomplex, since in that same period Hebrew was undergoing languagemodernization that is referred to by various terms in scholarly use – reviv-al, revitalization, revernacularization, relexification and others. I intend toshow that most trends in the area of loanword adaptation had beenformed by the 1910s in European Hebrew. The image of language changethat is reflected by the sources I use contradicts both traditional and revi-sionist general theories on Israeli Hebrew emergence.

The study guide is intended to develop EFL lexical and communicative competences through authentic English texts provided with a follow-up range  of exercises and activities. The book serves a purpose of concentrating the focus of teachers and students on the vocabulary of  monetary policy and  financial stability. 

The book prepared for the purposes of The 2nd World Congress on Logic and Religion, organised by the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. 

The book contains the final version of the abstracts submitted by majority of speakers.

Studies in Ethiopian Languages, Literature, and History. Festschrift for Getatchew Haile Presented by his Friends and Colleagues

Lemmatisation, which is one of the most important stages of text preprocessing, consists in grouping the inflected forms of a word together so they can be analysed as a single item. This task is often considered solved for most modern languages irregardless of their morphological type, but the situation is dramatically different for ancient languages. Rich inflectional system and high level of orthographic variation common to these languages together with lack of resources make lemmatising historical data a challenging task. It becomes more and more important as manuscripts are being extensively digitized now, but still remains poorly covered in literature. In this work, I compare a rule-based and a neural network based approach to lemmatisation in case of Early Irish data.

A corpus study of polysemy and collocability of Goidelic words for 'heavy' and 'light'

The Aphasia Rapid Test (ART; Azuar et al., 2013) is a bedside test allowing to rate aphasia severity in the acute stroke period. This test is developed as a 26-point scale estimating the severity of both speech comprehension and production less than in 5 minutes. Previously, ART was used in English and French clinical practice (Azuar et al., 2013). In Russian, there has been no analogous bedside screening scale for acute hospital units. Tests which were used before (Wasserman et al., 1987; Tsvetkova et al., 1981) are detailed, but time-consuming and effortful for patients in the first days post-stroke. ART is a reliable measure allowing to identify a language and speech disorders (aphasia, dysarthria or apraxia).

Older adults demonstrate a slower speed of linguistic processing, including sentence processing. In non-linguistic cognitive domains such as memory, research suggests that age- related slowing of processing speed may be a strategy adopted in order to avoid potential error and/or to spare “cognitive resources". So far, very few studies have tested whether older adults’ slower processing speed in the linguistic domain has a strategic nature as well. To fill this gap, we tested whether older adults can maintain language processing accuracy when a faster processing speed is enforced externally. Specifically, we compared sentence comprehension accuracy in younger and older adults when sentences were presented at the participant’s median self-paced reading speed versus twice as fast. We hypothesized that an external speed increase will cause a smaller accuracy decline in older than younger adults because older adults tend to adopt self-paced processing speeds “further away” from their performance limits. The hypothesis was not confirmed: the decline in accuracy due to faster presentation did not differ by age group. Thus, we found no evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. Based on our experimental design, we suggest that the age-related slowing of sentence processing is caused not only by motor slowdown, but also by a slowdown in cognitive processing.

The so-called “Museum” Slavonic translation of the Song of Songs contains a specific recension enrooted in Jewish Second Temple traditions. It becomes more plausible that the Slavonic translation has been produced in the earliest period of Slavic writing directly from Syriac rather than from Hebrew, as it was proposed earlier.

The poetry of Mikhail Lomonosov and Aleksandr Sumarokov played a decisive role in the establishment of Russian syllabo-tonic versification. Lomonosov’s early iambs show a noticeable foreign influence, whereas the prosodic structure of Sumarokov’s poems was formed in a fundamentally different way from the very start. The research presented in this article provides a new understanding of the sources of the rhythm of Sumarokov’s iambic verses, which represent a distinctive vector in the development of Russian verse. This vector displays significant differences from the principles of continental, West European syllabo-tonic poetry; an attempt at mastering whose principles can be observed in the early Lomonosov.  

Currently, a distributed bilateral network of frontal-parietal areas is regarded as the neural substrate of working memory (WM), with the verbal WM network being more left-lateralized. This conclusion is based primarily on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data that provides correlational evidence for brain regions involved in a task. However, fMRI cannot differentiate the areas that are fundamentally required for performing a task. These data can only come from brain-injured individuals who fail the task after the loss of specific brain areas. In addition to the lack of complimentary data, is the issue of the variety in the WM tasks used to assess verbal WM. When different tasks are assumed to measure the same behavior, this may mask the contributions of different brain regions. Here, we investigated the neural substrate of WM by using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) in 49 individuals with stroke-induced left hemisphere brain injuries. These participants completed two different verbal WM tasks: complex listening span and a word 2-back task. Behavioral results indicated that the two tasks were only slightly related, while the VLSM analysis revealed different critical regions associated with each task. Specifically, significant detriments in performance on the complex span task were found with lesions in the inferior frontal gyrus, while for the 2-back task, significant deficits were seen after injury to the superior and middle temporal gyri. Thus, the two tasks depend on the structural integrity of different, non-overlapping frontal and temporal brain regions, suggesting distinct neural and cognitive mechanisms triggered by the two tasks: rehearsal and cue-dependent selection in the complex span task, versus updating/auditory recognition in the 2-back task. These findings call into question the common practice of using these two tasks interchangeably in verbal WM research and undermine the legitimacy of aggregating data from studies with different WM tasks. Thus, the present study points out the importance of lesion studies in complementing functional neuroimaging findings and highlights the need to consider task demands in neuroimaging and neuropsychological investigations of WM.

At present, due to significant attention to communicative competencies of University graduates, the assessment of an adequate level of their foreign language proficiency becomes one of the priority tasks of University education. The classical forms of assessment activities are not able to satisfy the need to identify the degree of communicative competence development. The solution of the problem of optimization of forms and methods of assessment is being conducted today in different directions by Russian and foreign researchers of second language teaching methods.

The article focuses on the conditions of carrying out of communicative competence assessment that ensure the improvement of the quality of the assessment at Universities. The authors propose some practical solutions for improvement of assessment procedures among University students.

The article is devoted to the theoretical aspects of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). The author proceeds from the assumption that the interaction of people with their environment can be understood as receiving and decoding certain information. Certain types of information can be stored and be transferred only with the help of specially organized systems – languages, which are specially adapted to the given type of modelling and communication. Such a type of occupational verbal communicative system is identified as language for specific purposes. The article presents a survey of the corresponding scholarly literature, which reveals the views, opinions and approaches to the problems of professional communication. The author gives evidence that LSP is not fundamentally different from LGP in terms of linguistic usage but differs rather in terms of particular modes of language that are common in different professional settings. LSP is defined as a conventionalized semiotic system based on a natural language and characterized by a cognitive function, which indicates the development of civilization and serves as an instrument of professional work and training. Particular emphasis in the article is laid on English for Medical Studies (EMS). Subjected to analysis is the vocabulary of that professional domain.

preprocessing, consists in grouping the inflected forms of a word together so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word’s lemma, or dictionary form. It is not a very complicated task for languages such as English, where a paradigm consists of a few forms close in spelling; but when it comes to morphologically rich languages, such as Russian, Hungarian or Irish, lemmatisation becomes more challenging. However, this task is often considered solved for most resource-rich modern languages irregardless of their morphological type. The situation is dramatically different for ancient languages characterised not only by a rich inflectional system, but also by a high level of orthographic variation, and, what is more important, a very little amount of available data. These factors make automatic morphological analysis of historical language data an underrepresented field in comparison to other NLP tasks. This work describes a case of creating an Early Irish lemmatiser with a character-level sequence-to-sequence learning method that proves efficient to overcome data scarcity. A simple character-level sequenceto-sequence model trained during 34,000 iterations reached the accuracy score of 99.2 % for known words and 64.9 % for unknown words on a rather small corpus of 83,155 samples. It outperforms both the baseline and the rule-based model and meets the results of other systems working with historical data.

In the early 19th century the words predanie, legenda, and skazanie started to be used by Russian writers as a generic label. The present paper considers the texts with these labels in their titles or subtitles written by Vladimir Odoevsky. First, constituent features of the corpus of the texts labeled as predanie are identified. Then the same categories are explored in the texts marked as legenda and skazanie. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether these texts are built according to similar or different generic patterns. I argue that Odoevsky treated the notions differently, and the generically labelled texts reveal different genre strategies.

Although conflict representation in media has been widely studied, few attempts have been made to perform large-scale comparisons of agendas in the media of conflicting parties, especially for armed country-level confrontations. In this paper, we introduce quantitative evidence of agenda divergence between the media of conflicting parties in the course of the Ukrainian crisis 2013-2014. Using 45,000 messages from the online newsfeeds of a Russian and a Ukrainian TV channels, we perform topic modelling coupled with qualitative analysis to reveal crisis-related topics, assess their salience and map evolution of attention of both channels to each of those topics. We find that the two channels produce fundamentally different agenda sequences: in particular, while the Russian channel pays little attention to confrontation between the Ukrainian government and the opposition before the regime change, the Ukrainian channel is less inclined to cover armed violence in East Ukraine and refugees after the regime change.

The main way to mark the direct object in Russian dialects is the accusative case, but in some constructions the NP in direct object position marked by the nominative case. This case considered in the paper like case of Differential Object Marking (DOM) phenomenon, where NP in direct object position in certain conditions can be marked by the nominative case, but in “normal” conditions it marked by accusative case. The study describes this phenomenon in the North Russian dialects. Some different syntactic constructions with the nominative objects considered from the point of the DOM features: animacy, definiteness, word order, information structure, modality of predicates. In addition, the paper describes the issue of historical development of the constructions and the issue about syntactic status.

The topics explored in this essay include Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s reading practices in his young and mature years, reconstructed on the basis of various sources. The paper recontextualizes Krylov’s unique reading trajectory not always comprehensible for his contemporaries. It also highlights numerous links, not accentuated earlier, between Krylov’s strategies — in life, writing and publishing — and his service as a librarian in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg. The analysis of several situations showing Krylov as a brilliant reciter of his own texts who smartly deals with expectations and obsessions of his audience, allows to affirm the existence of a special connection - between his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the fable as a literary genre and the status of classical writer obtained by Krylov by 1830. Sub specie of this connection the transformations of the circle of Krylov’s readers are represented, as well as different ways of perception of his fables by children.  

The paper presents a Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme for a learner English corpus. The REALEC dataset consists of essays written in English by Russian-speaking university students in the course of general English. The essays are a part of students' preparation for the independent final examination similar to the international English exam. While adjusting existing dependency parsing tools to a learner data, one has to take into account to what extent students' mistakes provoke errors in the parser output. The ungrammatical and stylistically inappropriate utterances may challenge parsers' algorithms trained on grammatically appropriate written texts. In our experiments, we compared the output of the dependency parser UDpipe (trained on UD-English 2.0) with the results of manual parsing, placing a particular focus on parses of ungrammatical English clauses. We show how mistakes made by students influence the work of the parser. Overall, UDpipe performed reasonably well (UAS 92.9, LAS 91.7). The following cases cause the errors in automatic annotation a) incorrect detection of a head, b) incorrect detection of the relation type, as well as c) both. We propose some solutions which could improve the automatic output and thus make the assessment of syntactic complexity more reliable.

Learner corpora have great potential as sources of educational material. If a corpus contains annotations of mistakes in student works, it can be of use for the recognition and analysis of the most common error patterns. The error-annotation system of the learner corpus REALEC makes it possible to automatically generate different types of test questions and thus form exercises from the corpus data. This paper describes the creation of an automatic multiple-choice generator which works with the specific types of the student errors annotated in the texts of examination essays.

The paper discusses the main uses of a synthetic causative marker in Chukchi with special reference to non-causative effects of causative morphology. The causative morpheme expresses general causation when attached to patientive intransitive and some agentive intransitive predicates, namely verbs of directed motion, change of posture and ingestion. Other agentive predicates, intransitive as well as transitive, resist causativization and receive some non-causative interpretation if they form causatives. Such causative verbs usually have applicative-like or rearranging functions.

In this paper, I describe and analyze several types of nonverbal predication in Chukchi. Following [Matushansky 2008, 2010], I assume that Case is a realization of bundle formed by percolation of features assigned by different heads above the terminal node and explain the equative/absolutive variation in case-marking pattern observed in Chukchi nominal predication by feature percolation. The analysis of nominal predicational constructions is then extended to account for peculiar properties of adjectival predication.

In this paper, we argue that the imperative paradigm of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, Itelmen and Kerek, often viewed as morphologically homogeneous, is — at least in terms of its morphology — a composition of several independent inflectional categories.

The paper describes the ongoing research project on Ninilchik Russian as a unique variety of the Russian language. We believe it is a remnant of Alaskan Russian – a language that emerged at the end of the 18th century as a result of Russian colonial presence in Alaska and served as a means of communication in Russian America until the end of the Russian period in 1867. By that time Alaskan Russian became the native language for the people of mixed Russian/Native origin residing in various parts of Alaska. Ninilchik was one such place and, due to many factors combined, became a major location where this linguistic variety kept developing and serving as a means of communication, creating and maintaining cultural identity, and holding together the community of brave, persistent, and self-sustained people. Thanks to the people of Ninilchik, Alaskan Russian is still alive in the 21st century. The paper deals with two aspects of this multifaceted linguistic phenomenon. One is a theoretical problem of the “archaeological approach” to the language data which reflects a rather short but diverse history of Alaskan Russian and involves contact studies. Another is the Ninilchik Russian Dictionary project that allows to record both items and concepts, s well as the sociocultural narratives together making up the special story of the linguistic and cultural community

Donald Trump and his team have often been accused of having close ties to Russia and Russians expressed much greater support for Trump than residents of other countries. This article provides the first systematic analysis of Russian media coverage of Trump's activities during and after the election campaign. It concludes, on the basis of a sentiment analysis of relevant articles and network agendas of 500 Russian magazines and 250 leading federal newspapers, that Trump's media portrayal was not necessarily positive. During the election, Trump was portrayed by the Russian media not as Russia's favorite candidate, but as Hillary Clinton's opponent and a critic of U.S. recent policies. Only for a short period after Trump's victory in the elections, did the Russian media represent him as a friend of Russia, since there was hope that the new president would lift political and economic sanctions. Trump's policies failed to meet the expectations of the Russian people, and from the beginning of 2017, media coverage of Trump has become critical, hopes for lifting of political sanctions have weakened, and public opinion about the U.S. president has turned negative.

The paper addresses three controversial issues in two romances by Chrétien de Troyes - Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion and Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart. Both romances were written around 1176-1180 and because of their narrative continuity and complementarity could be considered as a diptych. First, we examine the evolution of Chretien’s conception of love, “mysteriously” changing from his first romances to Lancelot; then we enter into the debate between celtisants and their critics about the Celtic influence in Chretien and consider Celtic sources of the two romances; we conclude the article, tracing out the fairy tale paradigm in both romances, which helps us reveal new meanings of the cart and the lion, operating as magic agents in the romances.

The purpose of this study is to test the agenda-setting theory, according to which the media has a significant impact on what people consider to be important events. We compare the results of the Levada Center surveys on the most memorable events of the month with the number of publications on these issues in the press. We focused on the period from January 2014 to December 2016. A total of 884 events were analyzed in the article. The results of the study confirm the impact of discussions in the media on people's attention to the problem. The results also show that the discussions in the media one week before the date of polling are more important than the issues covered over the entire month. People better remember those events which took place shortly before the polling, as well as the events the discussion of which intensified during this period. It is also important to note the role of regional publications in the sensitization of the public to various issues. The issues covered by the national newspapers and news agencies, but ignored by the regional press, are much worse remembered by the population. The results of the study are controlled for background of the discussion: the presence of important events in each relevant month, which monopolized the public attention, is taken into account.

December 19, 2016, saw three tragedies simultaneously, that could not go unnoticed by the Russian media: dozens of people died as a result of a surrogate alcohol poisoning in Irkutsk, a Russian ambassador was killed in Turkey, and a terrorist attack took place at the Christmas market in Berlin. In this article using the network agenda theory we analyze how these tragedies were covered by various types of mass media: on 11 federal TV channels, in 1,974 print newspapers, in 34,905 online newspapers and 2,574 blogs. We believe that direct and indirect control of the agenda by the state can be exercised by creating a network of events that will canalize correctly discussions about tragedies. We showed that ties between the tragedy and a network of other acute issues are more important than objective circumstances, such as the number of victims or a geography of the event. The context in which the events were looked at led to greater attention to the killing of the ambassador and less attention to surrogate alcohol poisoning. The Russian mass media paid significantly less attention to the Berlin terror attack, it yet was used as a supplement to the demonstration of importance of the fight against terrorism.

Media audiences that represent a significant part of a county’s public may hold opinions on media-generated definitions of social problems different from those of media professionals. The proliferation of user-generated content makes such opinions available, but simultaneously demands new automatic methods of analysis that media scholars still have to master. In this paper, we show how topics regarded as problematic by media consumers may be revealed and analyzed by social scientists with a combination of data mining methods. Our dataset consists of 33,877 news items and 258,121 comments from a sample of regional newspapers. With a number of new, but simple indices we find that issue salience in media texts and its popularity with audience diverge. We conclude that our approach can help communication scholars effectively detect both popular and negatively perceived topics as good proxies of social problems.   

The Differential grammatical marking is a widely discussed topic in linguistic typology. Following works of Comrie [Comrie, 1981], Silverstein [Silverstein, 1976], Aissen [Aissen, 2003] and others there is a general assumption that the differential encoding can be accounting for by the markedness principles and that it is affected by pragmatic/discourse scales reflecting the degree of a NP/DP’s “salience”. In present work, the phenomenon of differential encoding is viewed in terms of a paradigm choice. The main question is what pragmatic factors trigger differentiation vs. assimilation of paradigms. There is a typological evidence for the following tendency: the high position of an argument on the referential scale leads to the differentiation of intransitive vs. transitive verbs encoding, while the focus position of an argument leads to the assimilation of paradigms. The Moksha (Mordvin, Finno-Ugric) data can serve as an additional evidence for such approach. There are two conjugation types for verbs in Moksha. One is for intransitive verbs and the other is for transitive verbs. However, the choice of paradigm for transitive verbs depends on certain pragmatic conditions. The referential scale in general goes in hand with the information status scale. We can reformulate the tendency as follows: topicality affects the differentiation of paradigms (a separate encoding for a transitive verb in contrast to an intransitive one is chosen) while focus position of an NP/DP often leads to paradigm assimilation (the transitive verbs are marked with the same set of affixes as intransitive ones). Thus, the main claim of present work is that the paradigm choice can be a device for information status encoding.  

It is generally assumed that the syntactic structure of participial relative clauses is impoverished, “reduced” in comparison to that of regular RCs (see a. o. Burzio 1981; Chomsky 1981; Hazout 2001; Siloni 1995; Stowell 1981). Participial RCs are often analysed as VP-like structures (for some, embedded under a nominalizing node, Doron & Reintges 2005; Hazout 2001; Siloni 1995, a. o., but see Kayne 1994 who argues that participial clauses have a C, but crucially not a T). The participial RCs typically (i) don’t license usual CP-material (wh-phrases, complementizers); (ii) don’t have an independent temporal reference; (iii) don’t have subjects. Based on the data of Meadow Mari (Uralic) I contend the two latter statements and show that Meadow Mari pRCs can have independent temporal reference and subjects. I further contrast the behaviour of reflexives in embedded infinitival and participial clauses and argue that even if there is a C level in pRC, it is quite different from that of infinitivals.