Nº 3 (2025)

This article contributes to the study of the naïve linguistic image of the soul through an analysis of word combinability. One of its components in Russian Linguistic Worldview is the notion of the soul’s inclination towards unity with other souls. This aspect of contextual figurative semantics concerning the word in question has been inadequately addressed in the scholarly literature. The study analyzes 54 instances of the the word dusha (‘soul’) combined with the verb prilepit’sya (‘adhere’). The article uses Russian National Corpus as a source of material. The image derived from the physical world (the adhesion of wet, sticky substances) denotes a high degree of closeness between objects, while in a figurative sense, it signifies strong attachment. Two variants of combinations are found in the texts: dushoy prilepit’sya (‘adhere with the soul’) and dusha prilepilas’ (‘the soul adhered’) (to someone, to something). The semantics choosing another person is embodied in descriptions of friendship and romantic attachment, spiritual closeness between a mentor and a junior companion, loyalty of servants to their masters, and the overcoming of class distinctions. The soul serves as the primary measure against which individuals evaluate themselves and other objects, not limited to surrounding people. Among other objects, besides human beings, whose selection is influenced by the soul are faith, geographical location, endeavor, idea, and activity that may become an object of temptation and captivate the soul.

The article is aimed at explaining the reasons why the introductory word please began to be used quite often as a part of indirectly expressed questions and requests in the modern Russian everyday speech. From the point of view of the Russian language norm, such construction is incorrect due to its redundancy: the semantics of the request here is expressed, on the one hand, implicitly, using an indirect speech act, and on the other hand, explicitly, through the introductory word please. As the article shows, the modern tendency towards non-normative use of the word please can be explained by the continuously increasing since the end of the 19th century heterogeneity of the Russian linguistic community. Due to the process of internal migration of the Russian population, which began during the period of industrialization of Russia, as well as due to the steadily expanding use of remote means of mass communication (radio, television, Internet) in recent decades, many Russian speakers have developed a need to take into account that the knowledge of their recipients may not completely coincide with their own knowledge. This entails the desire, as far as possible, to reduce the use of implicit means of expressing meanings and give preference to explicit means. Since the semantics of the request, idiomatically expressed by the entire structure of the sentence, may not be understood by an uninformed addressee, the sentence additionally includes an excessive explicit indicator of the request — the word please.

The article analyzes the names of dialect phonetic phenomena used in the works of scientists in the 19th century. They most clearly reflect the thorny path of the emergence of dialectology as a science in this period. We will follow the development of this group of vocabulary from the first examples that remained outside the framework of professional scientific discourse to large generalizing projects for the description of Russian dialects, which were undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century. During this time, the most active processes related to the formation of terms, competition of synonyms, their stylistic distribution and the elimination of unnecessary means occurred. We pay attention to the methods of designating the phonetic features of the dialect, since this vocabulary formed the basis for the description of the dialect continuum. Many folklorists, historians, ethnographers, publicists and linguists themselves proposed their own versions of dialect classification in the second half of the 19th century. In the article, we show that the designations of interest to us were drawn by dialectology directly from folk speech and until the beginning of the 20th century retained a connection with the original environment of use. They often contained an assessment of dialectal speech as illiterate and corrupted, and included vocabulary from the area of speech defects.

The paper provides a comparison of pitch declination rate in a verse line and a prosaic sentence. Pitch declination in speech is a gradual lowering of pitch from the beginning to the end of each phrase. Declination seems to be one of the natural characteristics of speech intonation pattern. This phenomenon is observed in baby cries and primate vocal signals as well, though certain intentional efforts may deliberately prevent it. The article discusses the necessity of the pitch declination analysis in intonation studies and reviews existing views on declination and different approaches to its description. The basic methods of its calculation, standard formulas and algorithms are presented. We have found that declination rate in verse meets the expected values for this parameter. The paper also observes and describes the high consistency of the declination phenomenon and the absence of its considerable deformations in its initial segment in comparison to prose. The results of the comparative analysis for the pitch offset levels in verse and prose are presented. The article also describes the results of comparing pitch declination in verse texts of different structure. We have shown that declination rate does not normally depend on rhythmical peculiarities of the verse. The tendency towards preserving its gradually descending intonational structure dominates over other linguistic parameters.