2024 Issue №4

The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by D. N. Ushakov and his colleagues, published between 1935 and 1940, is the first major dictionary of the post-revolutionary era, reflecting the lexical composition of both the literary and colloquial speech of educated people in the new Soviet Russia. It characterized the individual of the new social order and recorded emerging linguistic norms. The aim of this article is to present this dictionary as a potential source for the study of ethnolinguistic vocabulary. It is demonstrated that Ushakov’s work not only fulfills all the normative functions of an explanatory dictionary but also objectively contains a significant amount of dialectal vocabulary, as it was still in demand among speakers of that time and naturally of interest to ethnolinguists. The extensive system of stylistic and emotionally expressive labels in the dictionary today aids in identifying, on the one hand, new vocabulary from the Soviet era, and on the other, obsolete vocabulary that was still in use. Ushakov’s dictionary contains intriguing designations of Russian cultural realities, offering country-specific information that allows for a portrayal of Russian life. For this study, only subject-specific vocabulary was selected, using a random sampling method of words from certain groups reflecting ethnolinguistic content. The subsequent analysis of this vocabulary will enable the identification of the national and cultural specificity of the Russian language in the post-revolutionary era.

It is an axiom in modern linguistics that language must be studied with consideration of the anthropological factor. In this regard, scholars have shown increasing interest in the category of authorial modality. Since the late 1980s, numerous academic works have been devoted to exploring this category. However, unfortunately, the category of authorial modality has not yet been fully and comprehensively studied from a diachronic perspective; most researchers examine this category based on modern language, which limits the ability to observe its development over time.

This article focuses on the study of the modal organization in the Old Russian oratory prose monument The Epistle to the Ugra of Vassian Rylo (15th century). This outstanding text was written during a critical historical moment. Archbishop Vassian of Rostov, Yaroslavl, and Belozersk writes to Grand Duke Ivan III as Khan Akhmat advances towards Russia. The priest seeks to support his ruler and persuade him to resist the enemy. Considering that Vassian is writing to a superior, he cannot fully display his personal voice in the text. Nevertheless, he faces a clear task — to urge the prince to act. Therefore, the author employs means of exhortation, which we consider a leading component of authorial modality, as it serves as a means of expressing the author’s “self” in this text.

The article addresses certain translation challenges related to rendering quotes from Spanish and English into Russian: interference that occurs when formatting quotes in the target language, the phenomenon of mixed quoting and its features in different languages, and, finally, macro-level issues such as selecting a communicative strategy for translating a quote. Each of these issues is examined both as a linguistic phenomenon in its own right and from a didactic perspective: the difficulties that each aspect presents in translation training and possible solutions. All identified problems are illustrated with examples from Russian and foreign press, corpora, and student translations of quotes used in media texts. The original statements and their translations are analyzed in terms of semantics, style, and pragmatics.

The article describes neological units that have been functioning in the Russian language since the 1990s to characterize artisanal products or various types of counterfeit goods. The cognitive mechanisms underlying their formation are identified, based on the metonymic or metaphorical use of the image of fire, as represented in the root morpheme pal-. It is noted that the word-formation paradigm of the verb palit’ has expanded with the addition of derivatives with figurative meanings, including the adjectives palёny, samopalny, and the nouns palёnka, pal’, and palevo. The processes of these units’ combinatory expansion are described, reflecting extralinguistic changes. The stylistic markedness of the lexemes is characterized, and the identification and connotative components of their semantics, as well as their representation in operational lexicographic practice, are identified.

One of the branches of digital humanities research is the analysis of the structure of literary works. Among the research directions in this field, the creation of a social network of character interactions is particularly popular. Another important task is the analysis of the structure of a work, the identification of narrative units, and their comparison. This article proposes a quantitative method for identifying plot lines based on the analysis of character names and location names. The author’s division of the text into chapters is used as the unit of analysis, as it most adequately reflects the overall intent. The method is based on finding intersections of the onomastic content of chapters, with intersections evaluated using the Dice coefficient. The presence of a metric allows for the construction of a chapter connectivity graph, from which the most connected fragments can be extracted using the Louvain algorithm. The method has been tested on M. A. Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Primarily, the plotline of Yeshua and Pilate in Yershalaim was separated from the events in Moscow. The Moscow events were divided into three subplots: the story of the MASSOLIT members and their relationship with the Master, the Moscow Variety Theater and its employees, and Margarita’s story. The story of Woland and his retinue was closely intertwined with the other plots and did not form an independent fragment.