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The Slovo contains some 45 archaic words which are Altaic (Turkic) borrowings, most of which refer to the Cumans (polovci), since the epic describes the military campaign of 1185 AD against them. These archaic lexical elements in the text of the Slovo have always been an intractable problem for sceptics who have denied its antiquity and its authenticity. As a rule, the sceptics disregarded them. A. Mazon offered an ingenious, yet infelicitous explanation for their presence in the Slovo, claiming that they may have been imported by Tatar catechumens. A. A. Zimin attempted to deny the antiquity of the Turkic lexical content of the Slovo. In his book, E. L. Keenan argues that words in the Slovo, identified as Turkic borrowings, are, in reality, “ghost-words”, or are words which Josef Dobrovský invented or interpolated into the Slovo from different languages. Keenan acknowledges that in addition to toponyms and proper names of Turkic origin, the Slovo contains some Turkic loan words, but these, according to Keenan, are so few, and well known, that they may be considered irrelevant by the sceptics and may be disregarded. T. Fefer maintains that several Turkic lexical borrowings in the Slovo represent references to the opponents of Feofan Prokopovič. The present article critically surveys these hypotheses from the viewpoint of lexicology.
The subject of the present article is the poetry of Aleksej Apuchtin (1840–1893), one of the few Russian writers who wrote lyrical poetry during the years when realistic prose dominated literature and verse was looked upon as childish nonsense by the leading critics. On the one hand, Apuchtin’s verse shows the pessimistic traits characteristic of this epoch, but on the other hand his verse technique resembles that of his older contemporary Afanasij Fet, whose poetry, however, conveys a quite different – and much more optimistic, enthusiastic – mood.
In 1886, a book with the title Jesu budskap om Guds eller förnuftets rike appeared in Stockholm. The author was the Finn Carl Robert Sederholm (1818–1903), lieutenant-general in the Russian army. After studies at the Engineering Academy in St Petersburg he supervised fortification works in Southern Russia. He returned to Finland in 1883, as the commander of the local Russian engineering troops. Sederholm combined his military career with a strong interest in religious issues. In his books he interpreted Christianity as a universal religion with parallels to the teaching of Confucius, Buddha and the ancient Greek philosophers. The teaching of Christ was a rational religion and God was Spirit and Reason.
Sederholm translated his book into German and sent the manuscript to Tolstoj. Tolstoj’s three replies of August 1887 reveal that he attached great importance to the book. “Your thoughts about reason and the meaning of God are the same thoughts that I have tried to express in my works…,” he writes in his first letter. A few days later he writes again: “Curious how similar our opinions are…” In a third letter, Tolstoj was already more critical on some matters. He was also wondering how Sederholm could combine his belief in the teaching of Jesus with a military profession. Tolstoj’s three letters to Carl Sederholm have never been published before in Russian. Together with Sederholm’s two letters to Tolstoj they show what religious issues were of immediate concern for Tolstoj in 1887 and on what points he was more radical than his Finnish colleague.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism emerged as a mass phenomenon in the Russian public debate. Various explanations have been provided to account for the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment: religious bigotry; racism; state policy; and class enmity. The present article agrees with the class enmity approach that socio-economic factors were most important, but in contrast argues that Russian anti-Semitism was generated not by a confrontation between two different classes; instead, the main impetus was economic competition within the same social segments. This can be shown through a close reading of contemporary Russian anti-Semitic texts. Their authors often complained that the Jews exploited poor Russians by charging extortionate prices for their goods, but a closer look reveals that much more often the opposite charge was levied: that the Jews were selling their goods too cheaply. This was a problem, of course, not for the Jews’ customers, but for their competitors.
As the socio-economic position of the Russian Jews changed so did the social support bases of Russian anti-Semitism. When the Jews began to take higher education and qualified for ever new professions, pressure was building up to restrict their entry into high schools and universities. Finally, the article explores the possibilities of employing the job competition thesis to account for anti-Semitism and related phenomena at other times and in other parts of the world.
Ever since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) published their seminal monograph Metaphors We Live By, metaphor has been a cornerstone in cognitive linguistics, while metonymy has received less attention. However, recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in metonymy (Peirsman and Geeraerts 2006 and Croft 2006), and it is therefore natural to ask what the role of metonymy is in grammatical systems and how metonymy interacts with metaphor in such systems. The present paper sheds light on these questions on the basis of an analysis of Russian aspect, which Janda (2004 and 2007) has analyzed in terms of metaphor. I argue that metonymy relates the submeanings of the perfective aspect (section 3), that metonymy is pivotal in the relations among submeanings of the imperfective aspect (section 4), and – following Janda (2008) – that the relations between imperfective and perfective verbs involve metonymy (section 5). I propose that metaphor and metonymy are complementary in the Russian aspectual system; metaphor relates events to matter (objects and substances), while metonymy connects different types of events to each other (section 6). Before we turn to metonymy and its interaction with metaphor, it is necessary to define metaphor and metonymy and clarify the role of metaphor in Russian aspect (sections 1 and 2).
It is known that Russian has semelfactive Perfective verbs suffixed in -nu- such as prygnut´ ‘leap once’, but what do we know about how these verbs are formed and their role in the overall system of Russian aspect? Beyond occasional mention of such verbs in grammar books, there is little information, because no quantitative study of these verbs has been undertaken. This article attempts to rectify the situation by analyzing a database of 322 -nu- semelfactives and 1438 aspectually related verbs. Our approach makes it possible to probe the semantic and morphological characteristics associated with -nu- suffixation. In doing so we also address larger theoretical issues, such as the relationship between -nu- semelfactives and other actional Perfectives like zaprygat´ ‘begin to leap’, and the existence of prefixed semelfactives like vyprygnut´ ‘jump out once’. Our findings suggest revisions to current models of Russian aspect and indicate potential directions for further research.
This paper is devoted to studying words referring to sadness in Russian: grust´ and pečal´ and their derivatives. The research is based on the principles of “neo-Moscow” school of conceptual analysis. The paper shows that an important difference between grust´ and pečal´ is that grust´ is a mood while pečal´ is an emotional state. The article considers main characteristics of grust´ and pečal´, such as their duration, depth and intensity, and explains the use of these words and their derivatives in various combinations. It also demonstrates that in certain contexts, grustit´ can refer to related moods, such as displeasure, boredom, compassion and repentance, while pečalit´sja sometimes includes disappointment and frustration.
This paper examines the distribution in Russian of clauses containing a post-verbal subject pronoun. It shows that in the colloquial language a major function of such clauses is to assert a speaker’s control of the floor. It then illustrates some specific environments in which this constituent order occurs in literary texts, arguing that writers of fiction can extend its usage from the marking of changes in the actual narrating voice to the marking of certain types of shift in narrative point of view. The paper concludes that the stylistic interpretations of the post-verbal placement of thematic subjects which have been offered in earlier studies of Russian clause organization should be modified to recognize its pragmatic functions.
The article deals with the northernmost variety of what is traditionally called Burgenland Croatian (with ‘Burgenland’ used in a very broad sense). Because of its marginal geographic position, the dialect is potentially of great importance to anyone interested in Burgenland Croatian. However, the information on the dialect to be found in the linguistic literature is scarce. This is partly due to the fact that after the Second World War the speakers, who originally lived in three villages in southern Moravia, were forced to leave their homes and were spread over a large number of villages, mostly in northern Moravia. After the political changes in Czechoslovakia and its successor states it became possible to trace the Moravian Croats and to investigate their dialect, but until now only one article has appeared (Lončarić 1998). The present author, in contradistinction to Lončarić, is of the opinion that the dialect has a three-way accentual opposition in stressed syllables: vowels can be long or short, long vowels can be rising or falling. There is a length opposition in the first posttonic syllable. A number of characteristics distinguish the dialect from the neighbouring Čakavian dialects, the most important being (a) consistent lengthening of originally stressed short a; (b) no stress retraction from internal syllables to a preceding long syllable. Both these characteristics are relevant for the historical dialectology of Burgenland Croatian.