The topic of the article is the biography of Alexandre Barulin (1944– 2021), the prominent linguist and organizer of linguistic education in Russia.

The article focuses on the problem of setting the norm for the word-combination samyi luchshyi. The purposes of this research are 1) to challenge the statement about deviation of the word-combination samyi luchshyi from the established literary norm; 2) to prove this pattern satisfies the criteria of defining a language fact as a normative one, under support of data from The National Corpus of Russian Language (NCRL), Russian classical literature, web-portals (including the reference and information portal «Gramota.ru»), a number of dictionaries, descriptive and prescriptive grammars of the modern Russian language, grammar reference books; publisher’s guides and training manuals; 3) to reveal the grammatical and semantic peculiarities of the word-combination samyi luchshyi in comparison with the words samyi horoshyi and luchshyi given in different contexts. As a result, it has been found, that 1) in many authoritative works of modern scientists complex superlative degree formed with the help of an adjective in comparative degree ending in – shyi isn’t mentioned at all, and, as follows from this fact, the word-combination samyi luchshyi is forcibly deprived of the normative status, despite its compliance with the system of contemporary literary language and regular mass reproducibility; 2) the analytic form of the adjective samyi luchshyi is used to avoid grammatical homonymy with the form of comparative degree – luchshyi, to mark expression and forms of nonintrinsic-direct speech; 3) it is possible to assume the word-form luchshyi has some of the features of the lexeme with its own paradigm.

Alexander Barulin’s most notable results have to do with the communicative aspects of the human protolanguage. This kind of research differs from the conventional reconstructions of proto-languages because it cannot rely on material traces left by ancient humans, and the linguistic structures properly speaking are hardly available. Thus, linguists cannot put forward a description of phonetic and grammatical systems of the languages of the first humans. Instead, conjectures are usually made based on the etological-communicative studies of animal behaviour. Following Alexander Barulin, animal communication displays certain signs analogous to ‘hedges’, whose main function consists in accommodating information conveyed as a sort of ‘goods’ in communicative ‘exchange’. Hedges of “possibly” vs. “probably” types belong to linguistic techniques extensively used both in West-European and in Russian discourses. Lexical properties of such hedges interact with grammatical and pragmatical categories of tense, mood, and negation.

The paper presents the results of the investigation in the field of semiotic conceptualization of the human body on the basis of the analysis of phraseological units with the Spanish word corazón and its Russian analog сердце. A multi-feature method is applied to the analysis of phraseological material of the two languages. Among three types of features that characterize heart physical features are highly important. Two phraseological conceptualizations of the heart based on its physical features, such as “size”, “temperature”, “movement (beating)”, “fragility”, “insufficiency”, “redundancy” and “consistency” are considered and compared.

The article deals with some aspects of A.N. Barulin’s semiotic conception. The concept of “semoquake” introduced by him (which means significant periods of sharp and large-scale global changes in the evolution of sign systems, including language) is discussed here in a number of close metascientific terms of linguistic theory, such as “semiotic revolution”, “linguistic turn”, “language experiment”, and “language anomaly”. The study considers examples from linguistic practice, which, due to their anomalous nature, prompted linguists to new understandings of the essence of language. Over the last part of the 19th and the entire 20th century, linguistics conceptualized anomalies at the levels of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics, passing through three phases of a linguo-aesthetic turn along with literary experiments. The discussions of linguists about the role of correct and incorrect statements in the formation of language theories coincided both in time and content with an artistic language experiment, revealing common conceptual moves between science and art in the conditions that A.N. Barulin called “semoquake” (semotryasenie).

The article is devoted to causative verb alternation in Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic. I have analyzed the formal types of 31 causal/noncausal verb pairs developed by M. Haspelmath (1993). Field data were collected during the fieldtrip to the village of Urmiya, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. I show that Haspelmath’s ordering of verb meanings according to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence is valid for Urmi Neo-Aramaic. Events that are most likely to arise spontaneously, such as ‘boil’ or ‘dry’, are encoded by non-derived verbs in Christian Urmi, and their causative counterparts (‘boil’, ‘dry’) are morphologically marked. Labile verbs are used in Christian Urmi to denote situations that usually require an external agent, such as ‘break’ or ‘split’. The latter have replaced the anticausative encoding, which was preserved in Classical Syriac. Both Urmi Neo-Aramaic and Classical Syriac show predominance of the causative type of marking, so this type is diachronically stable. Urmi labile verbs can be divided into two groups: some were already labile in Syriac while the lability of others is an innovative Neo-Aramaic feature.