No 1 (2023)

The article is devoted to the description of the communicative behavior of the word istoria, which, as a result of the process of resemantization, is used in the “non-dictionary” meaning: ‘a thing/something’ and widely functions in modern everyday Russian speech in various types of discourse. The study was carried out on the material of 3 sources: the oral subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the corpus of Russian everyday speech “One Speech Day” and separate recordings of the surrounding speech (from everyday conversations, interviews, lectures, etc.). The problem of the functioning of the bleached word istoria is considered in several aspects: the dependence of such usages on the type of discourse and the characteristics of the speaker (age, professional activity, level of speech competence–LSC), as well as the ability of the resemantized word istoria to characterize an idiolect. It turned out that the word istoria with “empty” semantics plays a role of a multifunctional tool serving various types of discourse in modern Russian speech, and its active use is a result of saving speech efforts and does not characterize any particular social group of speakers. Such use has the character of an individual speech trait: in some cases, the word istoria acquires a status of a “parasite word” and indicates a low LSC of a native speaker, and in other situations, it indicates the desire of a speaker with a high LSC to establish an easy communication style.

In oral communication natural language is always combined with nonverbal signs of various nature, in particular paralanguage signs. The present paper describes usages and functions of lexical paralanguage units in Russian texts, mainly texts of anecdotes, where these units serve as a key to comic effect. The article analyzes examples of nonverbal imitation of speech pathology and ethnic, social, professional and other peculiarities of human communicative behavior. The paper describes some functions of paralinguistic signs such as their ability to imitate specific acts of pronunciation, to substitute taboo speech units or to denote other real actions. The authors pay attention to the form, meaning and usage of paralanguage units in Russian. Some of the units regarded are supplied with semantic descriptions and with descriptions of spheres of their usage. The article establishes syntactic function of paralanguage units in dialogues. Paralinguistic units constitute the class of so-called signalatives, which do not denote propositions but indicate peoples’ emotions or their mental activity

This article discusses the cases of punctuation in introductory words, adverbs and conjunctions that have not previously been described in the scientific and reference literature. Thepurpose of the study is to identify some actual problems of punctuation. We used a descriptive method, part of which is observation, and a psycholinguistic method, which includes an experiment (survey) to identify the established norm. The paper analyzes the rules contained in the most authoritative modern punctuation guides and gives recommendations to supplement them with relevant examples. The analysis of the survey results showed that difficulties in punctuation in the cases under consideration stem from an incomplete understanding of the principles of Russian punctuation among native speakers due to the lack of relevant information in the reference literature. Another conclusion we can draw as a result of the research is that the identification of new punctuation variants is associated with real speech practice. The paper concludes that the constructions that have been analyzed are used when writing texts of different styles, and therefore should be taken into account when codifying Russian punctuation and included in handbooks.

The image of the banya (a Russian steam bath) with its deep mythopoetic roots in the history of Russian literature is embodied in the works of the Soviet literature as well. Thus, the poems “Banya” by B. A. Slutsky and “White Banya” by V. S. Vysotsky create the archetypal images of the bathhouse, which, despite the realities of the Soviet life described in them, manifest their archaic syncretic nature. The plot of the banya visit is represented by talking about the past ‒ the military one in the first case and the labour camp one in the second. The motive of spiritual and physical purification connecting the two texts, accumulates the change of the temporal boundaries of the plot. As a borderline and a sacred space, banya locus seems to take the heroes into the past. It is typical that poets resort to the same dominants of artistic language in order to express such meanings. The poetics of repetitions and homogeneities, with the help of which the orientation towards assimilating oral-colloquial rather than literary-book speech is carried out, immerses the reader in the world of fabulousness and reveals the concept of paradise. At the same time, the poem by V. S. Vysotsky can be regarded as a logical continuation of Slutsky’s poem: the camp past of the lyrical hero depicted in “White Banya” fills the gap in the representation of the picture of that period. Initiating a dialogue with the text of B. A. Slutsky, the poem by V. S. Vysotsky makes the image of the era complete.