This paper deals with non-standard (substandard) linguistic units in Russian speech and their description in existing dictionaries of standard Russian, e. g. the word tselka ‘hymen; virgin (girl)’ and such words as bliad’, blia and blin in their interjectional and parenthetical use. It makes use of corpus data (in particular, data from the Russian National Corpus) and shows that their lexicographic descriptions often do not account for their use in speech. The paper makes special reference to lexical units that have both standard and non-standard meanings. In particular, it discusses the meaning and usage of the Russian verbs dat’ / davat’, konchit’ / konchat’, trakhnut’ / trakhat’, and trakhnut’sia / trakhat’sia. Non-standard meanings of these units have only recently received lexicographic descriptions. All these words deserve a thorough semantic and syntactic analysis (in particular, their government patterns should be carefully studied for each particular lexical meaning). The relation between standard and non-standard readings is idiosyncratic in each case and also should be taken into account. The paper aims to show that the descriptions of the words under consideration (not only descriptions of their nonstandard meanings but descriptions of their standard meanings as well) in existing dictionaries often require revision. It outlines ways of improving their lexicographic descriptions.
A review of: Walklate, J. (2023). Time and the museum: Literature, phenomenology, and the production of radical temporality. Routledge. 210 p.
The paper presents a brief synopsis of the latest academic events on the topic of the Asia-Pacific region held in St. Petersburg, namely the Maclay Readings conferences of 2023 and 2024 and «The issues of philology and ethnography of Southeast Asia» 2023. «Maclay Readings» is an annual conference run since 1980s by the Dept. of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) RAS. The forum on Southeast Asia was organized jointly by the Oriental Department of SPbSU, the Institute for Linguistic Studies and Kunstkamera RAS.
The article is focused on the history of news in Early Modern Europe, namely the history of newsletters — the predecessors of newspapers, which informed Europeans about current political affairs. Until quite recently it was widely accepted that only men read newsletters because they were interested in political events. In the last decade, however, studies of female epistolary culture have demonstrated that women also were part of the newsletters’ audience. The article presents an analysis of newsletters sent to Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608). Her correspondence is much better preserved than letter archives of any other woman of Tudor England. Five surviving newsletters from the Shrewsbury archive were addressed to the Countess by Hugh Fitzwilliam and written between 1569 and 1574. These letters contain domestic political news, as well as news from abroad. Analysis of the letters makes it possible to conclude that in the 1570s the news format available to Englishmen and Englishwomen was not yet a specialized news bulletin but newsletters sent from clients to patrons. In these letters, the news was focused on topics that were of interest to the patrons, and that could be explored in more detail on demand. The case of the Countess of Shrewsbury demonstrates that aristocratic women were interested in the same political topics as were the men of their families, and, like the men, ordered, consumed and disseminated the news.
The purpose of this article is to summarize a number of specific pragmatic changes characteristic of the use of Russian terms of address, which we propose to call a gender shift. Gender shift in the pragmatics of addresses consists in their non-standard use in the gender aspect, when addresses to women, such as mamochka ‘mommy’, matushka ‘mother’, are used towards men, and typical addresses to men, such as tovarishch ‘comrade’, druzhochek ‘buddy’, chuvak ‘dude’, are employed with women. It is noted in the article that gender shift in pragmatics of terms of address occurs under certain conditions and signals specific types of attitudes towards the interlocutor: patronizing, as to an equal, friendly, etc. Thus, the use of feminine terms of address to men is associated with a patronizing position of the speaker, as a rule, older in age and higher in status. These terms of address express an affectionate, patronizing, good-natured attitude of the elder towards the younger. The use by men of familiar and even masculine terms of address to women can express an attitude towards a woman not just as an equal, but also as «their brother», acceptance into a community such as a «men’s club». At the same time, the use of familiar, friendly male terms of address in communication between girls may reflect a desire to transferred to the female community relationships similar to relationships in informal male communities. In all these cases, we are not talking about gender-neutral terms of address, but about a gender shift associated with desemantization (semantic depletion), which is felt by native speakers as a living process. Research methods were used to analyze corpora and conduct surveys.
