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Literally: Amazing Words And Where They Come From, Rachel Wadham

Children's Book and Media Review

Discover the origins and meanings of twelve English words that come from a wide range of languages all over the world. From finding out that the origin of the world ukulele has to do with fleas to seeing how the use of the world royalty has changed over time, it is clear that the origin and history of words shape their meanings both in the past and in the present.

Русский Ковидный: Новые Языковые Явления Глобальной Пандемии, Елена Шмелева

Russian Language Journal

Я зык отражает все значимые события, происходящие в обществе, поэтому не удивительно, что так изменившая в 2020 году жизнь множества людей пандемия COVID-19 не могла не найти отражение в языке. Сложился новый глобальный дискурс коронавирусной эпохи – не случайно в разных странах и разных языках, где выбирают слова года, победителями в 2020 году стали такие слова, как коронавирус, маски, локдаун, социальное дистанцирование и др. В статье мы кратко охарактеризуем основные особенности «русского ковидного», обращая особое внимание на новые языковые явления – изменения в лексике (появление новых слов и выражений, рост частотности редких слов, переход терминов в разряд общеупотребительной лексики), новые …

From “Linguistic Turn” And Hebrews Scholarship To Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma Of A Structure, Gabriella Gelardini

BYU Studies Quarterly

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux.¹ The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye’s study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

“Blame The Due Of Blame”: The Ethics And Efficacy Of Curses In Richard Iii, Alexandra Malouf

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Language, particularly the language of cursing, plays a powerful role in determining the outcome of events in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gender imperatives reflected in the speech of Richard III’s characters indicate where power lies and how it is exercised across gendered spheres. While male characters in the history plays typically obtain and exert power through violence, both in war and in secret, the primary source of power held by female characters in Richard III is their use of language. Consistently, the women seal the violent ends of their enemies with curses, and Richard is perpetually given cause to …

Review: Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein; Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations, Ljiljana Durašković, Grant H. Lundberg

Russian Language Journal

As the title states, this volume was compiled in honor of the work and influence of Ronald F. Feldstein on the fields of accentology and Slavic linguistics. Though Professor Feldstein did some work in most of the areas covered in the volume, the book is unified by the ideas of the Prague Linguistic Circle and Jakobsonian structuralism, of which Feldstein was an important representative for many Slavic linguists working today.

Review: How Russian Came To Be The Way It Is. A Student Guide To The History Of The Russian Language; Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein, Ljiljana Durašković

Russian Language Journal

Tore Nesset is professor of Russian Linguistics at Arctic University of Norway. As many other professors, he has frequently found himself in situations where the simple conjugation of a verb like писать ‘write’ (1) triggered many questions from his Russian class. It is in practice impossible “to travel through time/centuries” every time a new exceptional form is introduced or mentioned in the setting of a language class. How Russian Came to Be the Way It Is is designed to make Russian more accessible to students by shedding light on Russian linguistic changes over its history.

On The Expressive Function Of Russian Quantitative Aktionsarten In Speech, Elena Nikolaenko

Russian Language Journal

The goal of this article is to examine the expressive function of Russian quantitative Aktionsarten in oral and written speech from the perspective of functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, the theoretical principles of which are outlined below. The focus will be on occasionally used Aktionsarten, which name an action quantity as “greater than the norm”; the term is used by native Russian speakers to express personal appreciation/depreciation of the action.

The Russian Prepositions Перед, Против And Напротив: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Marika Kalyuga

Russian Language Journal

There is an assumption in cognitive linguistics that most non-spatial senses of a preposition and a case are derived from a common (usually spatial) sense through metaphoric extensions. The metaphoric extensions involve the understanding of a concept, the so-called “target,” in terms of a more simple, concrete concept called the “source” (Lakoff 1987; Boers 1996; Boers & Demecheleer 1998). For this reason, prepositions and cases with a similar spatial sense frequently develop similar non-spatial senses. For example, the Ancient Greek prepositions πρό ‘before’ and ἀντί ‘opposite’ are associated with nearly the same proto-scenario or idealized mental representation of events linked …

Aspect And The Russian Verbal Base Form, Oscar E. Swan

Russian Language Journal

Roman Jakobson’s 1948 single-stem analysis of the Russian verb inspired many imitations and applications around the Slavic world, especially in American Russian pedagogy, where the names Alexander Lipson, Charles Townsend, and Maurice Levin come most readily to mind (see References). The first is a by-now dated two-part textbook series, grammatically innovative for its time, that is still available on the internet (although as far as I know it is not actually used anywhere), while the applied linguistic works by Townsend and Levin are still in print and are commonly used in graduate courses on the structure of Russian. It is …

Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg

Russian Language Journal

The Forms of Russian is a traditional approach to the fundamentals of Russian morphology based largely on the work of Jakobson, Levin, Lipson and Townsend. It is essentially the introductory course on Russian morphology that many, if not most, working North American Slavists took in graduate school. The work arises from such a course taught over many years by the author. The book is clearly intended for future teachers of Russian. The two main goals of the book are (1) to make working with and using Russian easier and (2) to explain how to establish a systematic description of Russian. …

Review: Russian Case Morphology And The Syntactic Categories, John Frederick Bailyn

Russian Language Journal

David Pesetsky’s Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories (MIT Press, 2013) is one of the most thought-provoking works of theoretical linguistics to appear in many years. It provides a startlingly original analysis of a well-known thorny problem of Russian morpho-syntax, embedding the analysis of that puzzle within a radical rethinking of the role of case in syntactic theory, and taking us on a journey of consequences and extensions that challenge one’s views of many aspects of minimalist theory, including key components of case theory, phrase structure, locality and others. If a monograph is to be judged by its creativity, …

Politeness And Sociocultural Values In American And Russian Cultures Emerging From The Speech Act Of Complaint; Pragmatic Competence Of L2 Learners Of Russian, Beata Gallaher

Russian Language Journal

In the last two decades, there has been an increasing number of empirical studies on complaints that explore the effects of sociocultural values and linguistic politeness on the language performance of nativeand non-native speakers of English (Kasper 1981; Piotrowska 1987; Olshtain and Weinbach 1987, 1993; Trosborg 1995; Arent 1996; Murphy and Neu 1996; Kraft and Geluykens 2002, 2007; Tanck 2002; Umar 2006; Prykarpatska 2008). However, the empirical data on complaints by Russian native and non-native speakers remains scarce (Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Gershenson 2003; Kozlova 2004; Perelmutter 2010). The research on complaints is particularly important for studying the impact of …

Review: The Meek One: A Fantastic Story: An Annotated Russian Reader, Cynthia L. Martin

Russian Language Journal

Both of these readers are excellent additions to available annotated readers for students of Russian that would be most appropriate after students have completed two full years of Russian.

Introduction

Russian Language Journal

On behalf of the editorial team of the Russian Language Journal, it is with great pleasure that we present Volume 63. The current issue of RLJ sees a number of changes to the editorial team as well as an expansion of the kinds of materials we publish; we hope that these changes serve both the profession and our readers. Starting with this issue, we will include review articles, as well as a section of shorter book reviews. Michael Gorham, our Associate Editor, leads this effort for the RLJ. As well, there are two new appointments to the Editorial Team: Dr. …

Using A Corpus-Based Approach To Russian As A Foreign Language Materials Development, Edie Furniss

Russian Language Journal

The increase in availability and sophistication of corpora in recent years has facilitated the application of usage-based approaches to language pedagogy. Although the use of corpus data is certainly not without its difficulties, it offers great pedagogical promise. Corpora, consisting of natural language culled from a multitude of sources and genres, provide valuable information about language in use. While a corpus can provide us with contextualized linguistic data and statistics on the behavior of lexicon (with respect to frequency and collocation), a connection needs to be forged between the data and their practical use. Two main areas ripe for the …

Connecting Classrooms: Russian Language Teaching Project At Ucf, Alla Kourova

Russian Language Journal

Change happens all the time and in all places. It is a characteristic of our modern world. A current trend in the world is globalization, which occurred by rapid developments in transportation and information technology. Today, people from diverse backgrounds come into more and more contact with each other with a regularity that is unique to this period of human history. As a result, intercultural communication has become increasingly important.

Learners And Teachers: The Application Of Psychology To Second-Language Acquisition, Madeline Ehrman

Russian Language Journal

The successful acquisition of second languages depends as much on good psychology as it does on sound linguistics. Both teaching and learning can be enriched by understanding and applying basic psychological principles.

The speaking and reading performance of second-language learners has received a great deal of attention in areas of applied linguistics such as conversation analysis, speech production analysis, oral testing research, classroom interaction analysis, and task-based learning research.(Ellis, 1994). In addition to linguistic variables, researchers have examined psychological determinants of learner achievement in speech performance, among them “individual difference variables.” These relatively stable learner characteristics—including language aptitude, motivation, and …

Singular And Plural Address In The Scriptures, James R. Rasband

BYU Studies Quarterly

Steeped in post-Enlightenment philosophy with its primary focus on the individual, modern readers may unwittingly assume that the Lord likewise is focused solely on individuals when he promises blessings or assigns responsibilities. Although the scriptures contain many instances where the Lord speaks to individuals separately, he also speaks to the Church or his people collectively. It is not always easy to distinguish between these two modes of address, especially because the English pronoun you can be either singular or plural. However, awareness of this linguistic issue can improve our reading of the scriptures, at times revising our understanding substantially.