2018 Vol. 9 №1

The author describes the private life of Roman Jakobson between 1920 and 1939 when he lived in the former Czechoslovakia, first as a Soviet diplomat and later as a scholar caught in a thick web of political intrigues. Using archival documents, the author illustrates Roman Jakobson’s complex and often contradictory relations with the trio of political institutions within whose orbits he was moving: 1) the Ministry of Interior; 2) the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 3) and the Soviet Red Cross Mission/Political Representation in Prague. The reader is invited to assess Jakobson’s loyalties: whether to concur with Georgii Chicherin’s opinion that Jakobson is perhaps “an unreliable but absolutely indispensable” because, as the chief of the Soviet delegation, Antonov-Ovseenko, put it, “a good half of our information comes from him,” or to give credence to the Prague Police Directorate’s portrayal of Jakobson as the resident of “the Third International… charged… with a political mission,” or to accept as fact a testimonial letter by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs according to which Jakobson not only “wished to help our nation and did help” but “will be able to render very good services to our state also in the future.”

This article considers the conjunction functions of the logical and modal particle tolko. A study into the functioning of logical and modal particles led the author to identify the basic syntactic positions that determine the functional and grammatical status of the lexical units studied: the particle, the conjunction particle, and the conjunction analogue. The conjunction behaviour of a particle can be manifested to a greater or lesser degree. The particle/conjunction relation forms a gradient. In an utterance, the lexeme studied fulfils either the primary function of a logical and modal particle or the secondary one of a conjunction. In the latter case, the lexeme becomes a conjunction particle or a conjunction analogue. The author proposes a new method for differentiating between a conjunction particle and a conjunction conjunctive. The analysis of the functions of the lexeme tolko (without considering the temporal meanings) revealed an interesting pattern. The lexeme’s functional semantics of the connector stems from four potential meanings — restrictiveness, adversativeness, concessiveness, and resultativeness. The author identifies the following variants of the lexeme tolko — an adversative- restrictive conjunction particle, an adversative-concessive conjunction analogue, a concessive- resultative conjunction analogue, and a conjunction analogue conveying the meaning of the total result. All these variants have semantic and constructive subtypes.

The author offers a review of M. J.Tagaev's monograph "Dialogue of Languages and Cultures" (the functioning and interaction of cultural and linguistic spaces of the Kyrgyz and Russian languages). Bishkek: Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University Publishing House, 2015. 240 p. The reviewer notes the acute character of the problem, typical of the post-Soviet states and analyzes the functioning of the state and official languages in Kyrgyzstan.