The article describes the professional career of Grigiriy Efimovich Kreydlin, the well-known linguist who works within the framework of structural linguistics. The author describes Kreydlin’s participation in a number of linguistic conferences as well as them working together on a textbook on semiotics for children. The author shares his impressions about the professional and personal qualities of G.E. Kreydlin.

The paper deals with the history of a well-known Moscow center of linguistics and semiotics of the second part in the XXth century: the Department of Semiotics / Theoretical problems of informatics, All-Union Institute for scientific and technical information RAS (VINITI). It highlights the role of Grigory Kreidlin in the life of this department.

The present article is devoted to the key aspects of G.E. Kreydlin’s work, particularly to the seminar on nonverbal semiotics, which he launched in early 1990s for school children, students and academics on the basis of the Institute of Linguistics at Russian State University for the Humanities. The authors tell a story of how the seminar has been developing since 2003 till present, how the Dictionary of the Language of Russian Gestures and other classical works were written and how it feels - to be a student of G.E. Kreydlin.

The paper deals with the main notions and postulates of the aspectual conception of Ju.S.Maslov - as it was accepted and developed by his followers. Problems connected with inflectional vs. derivational treatment of aspect are considered; problems connected with the aspectual pair and the famous Maslov’s criterion; indicators of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The attention is paid to the notion of viewpoint and point of reference: the opposition of Imperfective and Perfective aspect consists in that the Perfective expresses unambiguously retrospective viewpoint of the situation (in the Past as well as in the Present Tense), while Imperfective is ambiguous as to viewpoint. It may express synchronous viewpoint in the progressive of the Present tense, but is compatible with the retrospective aspect of the Past tense and prospective aspect of the Future tense. An important role in Maslov’s and post-Maslov’s conception of aspect is played by the notion of limit (terminativity) and the aspectual classification of verbs that stands behind it.

In the paper to the general concept of the number is considered. A part of the paper is devoted to reviewing this concept in terms of the modern mathematics; in the other part the expressibility of various languages is considered from the viewpoint of naming of quantities of objects in the ambient physical world and creating the notions, independent on the nature of these objects. A special attention is paid to the problem of large natural numbers. In the end of the paper the mathematical and linguistic problems, related to the infinite sets, are briefly discussed.

In the article I try to describe the role of symptomatic signs of the humanemotional state in communication, demonstrate and analyze the capabilities of emotional reactions to serve in dialog as functional equivalents of replies.

The paper deals with the use of the Russian personal pronouns ty (informal) and vy (formal) as formmodels of addressing one interlocutor. It discusses certain special cases and draws attention to the variation of the corresponding linguistic standards.

The present paper focuses on functional and semantic characteristics of hæfdon+past participle in Old English and habdun+past participle in Old Saxon based on the sample retrieved from separate texts. The results of the analysis are interpreted within the frame of the grammaticalisation theory which helps to outline the paths of the development of the perfect meaning in the constructions under consideration. The paper also aims at solving the issue of whether already at that stage the constructions expressed a taxis function, the one which is typical of the Present Day English.

A universal list of surface-syntactic relations [SSyntRels] is compiled based on the idea that a SSyntRel r is “the same” in different languages if and only if this r has the same set of core functions in all these languages (just like the nominative in different languages is still a nominative since it is used everywhere for nomination-its core function; its other functions might be different). A few remarks are formulated on the Deep-Syntactic structure: 12 universal deep-syntactic relations are briefly introduced, and a list of 30 fictitious lexemes is presented (they are used in DSyntSs to represent syntactic constructions carrying lexical-type meanings). After a concise characterization of SSyntRels, the paper offers a list of 112 SSyntRels known in world languages: subordinate and coordinate; the subordinate SSyntRels are divided into clause-level and phrase-level SSyntRels, with further subdivision into valence-controlled vs. non-valence-controlled and then into Noun Phrase SSyntRels, Adpositional Phrase SSyntRels, etc.

The paper deals with well known bottlenecks while analyzing natural texts: ambiguity of all kinds, incompleteness (structural or semantic) and soon. To cross this threshold in a regular way any system has to turn into the whole text context which is the first deadlock for most linguistic systems. The more important deadlock is a lack of knowledge components - general as well as specialized (professional) ones. Some new experimental structure - Semantic space - is regarded where all defects of a text under analysis are expressed in an explicit way thus ensuring the coherence of all parts of the text. Such continuous and elastic SemSpace may be widened by user’s question and missing knowledge as well as compressed etc. The rules of analyzing (linguistic, logic, statistic etc.) wait for new experimentations.

This paper presents a method of an automatic construction of a questionnaire for lexical typological research of words from two lexical classes: adjectives and intransitive verbs. It is shown that the algorithm is applicable for both wordclasses, but on one of the stages, it needs some modifications caused by differences in frequencies and distributional properties of the words in question.