The article commemorates the 80^th birthday anniversary of Sergei Gindin. It provides a brief overview of the conference “Spheres and boundaries of linguistic research. In memory of S.I. Gindin”, held by the Institute of Linguistics in March 2024 at the RSUH. It also presents a biographical information about the main stages of Sergei Iosifovich’s creative career, his achievements as a theoretical scientist who combined philological and linguistic approaches in creating ‘text linguistics’, as a practiсal scientist, who compiled a systematic index of Russian works on poetry since 1958, developed an information base on the works of V. Bryusov, as a lecturer and head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, who has prepared a number of university courses in linguistics and philology, as an editor and educator, who prepared many publications and articles contributing to the popularization of Russian humanities. 

The article studies the role and invaluable contribution of S.I. Gindin to preserving the scientific heritage in Russian science. Some of S.I. Gindin’s speeches and published works, in which he defines the tasks of philology, reveals the meaning and significance of the ideas and achievements of such 20^th century philologists, as G.O. Vinokur, N.I. Zhinkin, M.V. Panov, Yu.S. Martemyanov, and V.Ya. Bryusov, are discussed. His work on preserving the scientific heritage of his father, I.F. Gindin, a leading Russian historian and economist, is considered as well.

The article also illuminates S.I. Gindin’s extensive work with their personal archives, due to which their works were published, commented on and entered the publicly available fund of achievements of Russian science.

The article deals with semantically conditioned deviations from certain formal parameters of the organization of a poetic text (primarily, the meter and rhyme scheme). Various effects of the interaction between the form and the meaning are considered on the basis of poems by G.R. Derzhavin, I.A. Brodsky, L.N. Martynov, A.A. Akhmatova, O.E. Mandelstam, S.N. Markov, N.M. Olev. In conclusion, some considerations concerning the “eternal” problem “Author’s intent or the arbitrariness of the researcher?” are provided.

The article deals with two Marina Tsvetaeva’s early poems “Neither Here nor There” and “Three Kisses” consisting of three quatrains, which are organized according to a similar compositional principle: each stanza involves a repetition of the situation combined with a grasp of something important on a new level. That type of composition can be defined as “compositional gradation” (according to V. Holshevnikov). The lyrical comprehension of the phenomenon is conveyed through the change of one or two words, as well as through punctuation, repetitions, anaphora, epiphora and enjambments. Gesture, intonation, and rhythm also play a significant role. All levels of composition participate in the identification of the semantics of poems: lexical, syntactic, intonational, and rhythmic. Thus, at different levels of textual organization in Tsvetaeva’s three-part poems, a certain concept of the heroine’s attitude toward being is revealed.

The article studies the semantics of tears and weeping in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (10^th century) and puts forward the thesis that these notions are conceptualised within the poem. It analyses the linguistic means used to describe the characters’ tears and weeping, conveying their properties, causes and accompanying actions. The study identifies six key aspects that help to distinguish the meanings of ‘tears’ and ‘weeping’ from other meanings of polysemous words, thereby identifying the main contexts of weeping in the text: the spatial dimension of tears (their source and direction), properties of tears, emotional causes of weeping, characteristics of weeping, intensity of tears, and accompanying gestures. Particular attention is paid to the polysemous words āb (water/tears) and xūn (blood/tears of blood), as well as their combinations in ezāfe constructions. Statistical data on the frequency of the relevant lexical items are also provided. The findings may be used to investigate the semantic evolution of tears in Persian literary culture. The study is based on the critical edition of the Shahnameh original (Moscow, 1960–1968).

The article considers strategies of speech impact in judicial dialogues as a specific form of institutional communication. The analysis focuses on the legal discourse, where the lawyer’s speech is subject both to legal norms and to persuasive strategies. Special attention is paid to cross-examination as a dialogue genre in which the positions of prosecution and defense collide. The research is based on the trial speeches of Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer created by E.S. Gardner. The analysis makes it possible to identify patterns of rational and emotional influence, as well as tactics of logical pressure, statements of leading and confirming questions, and appeals to contradictions in testimonies. A detailed description of the communicative situation in a court session allows for the analysis of its verbal and non-verbal components.

It is shown that judicial dialogues represent a multi-level polylogue, including the basic level of dialogue between a lawyer/prosecutor and a witness on the fact of a crime and a meta-level at which the judge and other participants in the meeting (including jury and audience) are involved, and the subject of discussion is the basic dialogue. Judicial dialogues demonstrate complex strategies of argumentation and speech influence in legal communication. Given the limited public availability of courtroom data, descriptions of court proceedings in fiction can provide valuable insights for analyzing judicial discourse.

The article reviews the lexeme kolokol’chik (‘a little bell’, ‘a bluebell’): the features of its contextual usage, analysis of meanings and establishment of hierarchical links between them. The research is aimed to describe the system of meanings of a polysemantic word and determine a linguistic status of each meaning. The research material includes examples from the Russian National Corpus.

The lexeme kolokol’chik has two main meanings that form other meanings, including contextual ones: 1) a bell (as an object) or its sound; 2) a bluebell (a flower) or its shape. It is obvious that the metaphorical meaning ‘type of flower’ is secondary to the original meaning ‘small bell’.

The article shows that currently, Russian speakers associate the word kolokol’chik in equal measure with a flower and with a bell. Yet, the data of the Russian National Corpus do not confirm that the “flower” meaning is more common. However, a diachronic approach – a sequential analysis of contexts from different time periods (19^th, 20^th and the turn of the 20^th – 21^st centuries) – demonstrated a fairly intense increase in the number of ‘floral-visual’ meanings with a significant decrease in the frequency of ‘object-sound’ ones. Therefore, it is possible to say that now we see the process of changing the statuses of two meanings of the same lexeme: the original meaning stops being the main one.

The author outlines the reception of Noam Chomsky’s philosophy of language and his theoretical linguistic models, in Soviet linguistics of the 1970s–1980s. Authors who in the 1960s were fascinated by Chomsky’s transformational model and used formal methods of studying language (the ‘formalists’) by that time lost interest in his works, because the generative semantics project led by George Lakoff, James McCawley and others, and later Igor Mel’čuk’s “Meaning ⇔ Text” built on similar assumptions, seemed to them more promising. The development of generative grammar from rule theory to constraint theory and the triumph of lexicalism over generative semantics in the 1970s went unnoticed by researchers in the USSR. The “orthodox” group of Soviet linguists who tried to find support in the official ideology, launched a fierce campaign against Chomsky which in spite of some theoretical interest, raised no contentful discussion and ended in failure.

The article presents a number of basic provisions of Polish linguistic trends – ethnolinguistic and linguacultural, working within the framework of ‘language and culture’. Nowadays, the issue is extremely popular all over the world, it is actively developing and giving rise to new areas and aspects of research. The material is presented against the background of the problematics of Russian linguistic trends of the relevant profile. The similarities and differences within Polish national schools and between them and the profile of Russian studies are established, and the common character of the theoretical basis of Polish and Russian studies is emphasized. The specific features of trends focused on the topic of ‘language and culture’ are considered in the light of both relevant theoretical and lexicographical works. The sources of a number of nuclear concepts and terms used by representatives of the described areas are given. The achievements of the considered directions are briefly characterized. The specifics of national schools and traditions are emphasized, and the features of research approaches and styles are highlighted. Attention is drawn to the fundamental nature and scientific reliability of the works produced by scientists working in the framework of the presented areas; the effectiveness of work and the reliability of its results are also ensured by a common parentage and a unified theoretical basis.

The article focuses on the state of things in the field of Russian Translation Studies in the 1990s and 2010s. The author assumes that the definitive tendency has been the coexistence of linguistic theory of translation as a traditional one for the Russian humanities, and Translation Studies as the interdisciplinary approach to translation research as it shaped itself in the given period. The term “perevodovedeniye” is considered to be a calque borrowing from English “translation studies”. Also, the primary source of the original notion is referred to and contextualized, and the special meaning of its Russian counterpart is defined. Three trends are explicated in the author’s survey of the theses and publications of the Russian Translation Studies scholars of the period in question. First, the recent developments within the framework of linguistic theory of translation are highlighted. Second, the interdisciplinary research projects are indicated. Third, the process of assimilating the Western Translation Studies concepts is outlined. In particular, the scholarly works of N.V. Ivanov, I.V. Ubozhenko and V.I. Shadrin, et al are referred to as the mainstream contributions to the shaping up of the interdisciplinary approach to translation research at the crossroads of linguistics, semiotics and cultural studies. By way of concluding, there is stated the urgent need of publishing the Russian translations of the most important works of foreign translation scholars of the 1970s and 2000s, alongside compiling a special dictionary of Translation Studies terminology.

The article deals with the results of an instrumental study of the larynx work in order to determine the correlation between laryngeal (characterizing larynx and vocal folds vibrations) and acoustic (pitch frequency, duration and intensity) properties of vowels and stress in Iranian languages. The methodological basis of the study is experimental and statistical analysis, as well as a comparative approach. The material used was studio recordings of speech in Iranian languages, obtained using a microphone and an electroglottograph. That tool allows non-invasive assessment of the degree of the vocal cords closure during phonation and sound articulation. When recording speech, the acoustic and laryngeal signals are registered separately, which improves the quality of the analyzed materials and separates the speech flow from extraneous noises. Native speakers of Persian (three men and three women), Gilaki (three women) and Wakhi (two men and two women) took part in the study. The vowel parameters were analyzed using the Praat speech analysis program and statistically processed in the IBM SPSS Statistics program. The results showed that in the languages examined, stressed syllables are marked by different means. The stressed vowel in Persian is marked by an increase in pitch and decrease in infrasonic frequency of laryngeal oscillations (laryngeal correlate). In Gilaki duration plays a key role in marking vowel stress, somewhat less regularly – an increase in the frequency of the pitch and intensity, a laryngeal correlate has also been discovered – the amplitude of the vertical displacement of the larynx. Wakhi stress proved to be multicomponent, combining the leading quantitative and tonic components with a dynamic one; in addition, the amplitude of the vertical movement of the larynx (laryngeal correlate) is significantly related to stress.

The memorial article is dedicated to the linguist Grigory Efimovich Kreydlin, who died in June 2025 in Moscow. G.E. Kreydlin was a doctor of philological sciences, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, a leading specialist in nonverbal communication and a founder of the science of human bodily behavior and interaction – nonverbal semiotics. The authors recall the main works and achievements of their teacher, the years of study and work under his supervision.