2017 Issue №4

This article is devoted to the lexis of the Russian language denoting mental states. The study of the words and their functions rests on the psychological interpretation and classification of mental states. The author describes how a person’s mental life is expressed as a system of interacting and interdependent mental states in the language picture of the world. The semantics and history of the words chuvstvo, etmotsiya, and oschuschenie are investigated. It is concluded that the words chuvstvo and chuvstvovat have priority over the other lexical choices.

The social determination of current neological processes contributes to the expansion of the vocabulary of the contemporary Russian language. In analysing new nouns derived from verbs, this article examines the nouns’ productivity and contribution to the word formation in the contemporary Russian language. Dictionaries of new lexis, media texts, and the Russian National Corpus are used to identify and describe the most productive wordformation types and models for verbal nouns with procedural semantics. The author investigates the connection between such nouns and denominative neo-derivatives with a meaning of an abstract action. The study follows the anthropocentric paradigm.

This article analyses the concept of performative utterance, its primary characteristics, and properties. Audio and video sources are employed to identify secondary forms expressing performative utterances in the mother-child communication and to examine the use of such utterances in the speech. This type of utterances is considered as characteristic of the speech of a woman performing the social role of a mother.

Wry humor as cultural phenomenon thematically is organized as a semantic field and focuses on six major components: death and associated with it, destruction of human physiology, fear of danger, threats to beloved ones, social catastrophes, necrophilia. A “play principle” is actively being implemented in all these cases.

This article considers the speech portrait of the renowned Soviet critic A. V. Makedonov — A. T. Tvardovsky's friend and companion. Makedonov’s correspondence with Margareta O. Thompson, an American student of Tvardovsky’s oeuvre, dates back to the early 1990s. The epistolary discourse is examined from the perspective of cultural linguistics as an exemplary speech of a descendant of a Saint Petersburg intelligentsia family, born in the early 20th century and a witness to corresponding historical events. This is the first time the materials have been presented to the research community.