Volume 53, Issue 2

The article deals with the history and the current situation of the edition of the Old Russian historical dictionaries. In the last years since prof. V. B. Krys'ko took on the editorship of both dictionaries a lot of measures had been undertaken to improve and to accelerate the editorial work. As additions to the dictionaries are mentioned two phraseological units from the 15 th century sokolom vorony imatь and kudy socha chodila i toporъ, i kosa, i ženь are mentioned.

Slavic languages show differences in the syntactic realization of arguments of ditransitive verbs as, e.g., give. While Czech and Russian use dative indirect objects (IOs) which precede the direct object (DO), IOs of ditransitives in Bulgarian are marked by a preposition-like element na and follow the DO. Within a framework assuming that Argument Structure is a component part of verbal lexical entries (cf. Bierwisch 1996, a.o.) and syntactic structure of the VP is projected from the lexicon depending on the argument hierarchy, the question arises what is the basic linearization of arguments of ditransitives in Russian, Czech, and Bulgarian. We will argue that the two structures attested in the languages under investigation do not correspond to what has become known as Dative Alternation in English and that there is no need for specific semantic representations for Bulgarian ditransitives. In the relevant cases, the hierarchy of argument variables is changed through application of a semantic template. This accounts for the unmarked DO > IO order in Bulgarian.

In the present paper, I investigate different types of impersonal sentences in Slavic languages focusing on impersonal sentences with accusative internal arguments (objects). These constructions pose various questions concerning selectional properties of the categories involved in the syntactic derivation of the respective sentences and concerning the licensing of morphological markers, esp. of the accusative of internal arguments and of the dative of quasi-subjects with certain types of reflexive impersonals. I will discuss these issues in the first two sections following the introduction claiming that at least the main (verbal) predicates of impersonals sentences with accusative internal arguments also select a semantically bleached, phonetically null external argument. The arguments for this analysis involve both theoretical and empirical considerations. In section 4, I will briefly turn to the impersonal morphological markers of verbal and nominal predicates. I will propose a default mechanism for the impersonal variant relying on feature hierarchies and markedness rejecting an agreement analysis with the phonetically null external argument.

The present study tests the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis using the first language acquisition data of a bilingual Russian-German-speaking child. Emphasis was placed on (1) the early development of infinitives and (2) the acquisition of the first person (1.P.) (I-concept), especially within the construction “personal prounoun (1.P. Sg.) + verb (1.P.Sg.)”. In both of these cases, an asymmetrical process was documented for German and Russian. The phenomena described indicate that the process of language learning includes a lexeme-specific phase (e.g. a chunk-phase). These constructions are transferable to similar types of cases within the same language only after enough lexeme-specific forms have been learned. At the beginning of language acquisition, what is learned in one language can not automatically be applied in the grammatical constructions of the other language.

The present article is a contribution to the linguistic analysis of Russian political texts, based on the speech delivered by President Vladimir Putin at the 43 rd Munich Conference on Security Policy in February 2007. The study demonstrates various characteristic features of this text, e. g. a strongly speaker-oriented formulation style. Special attention is given to Putin's debate about political forces like the United States and the NATO, using selected examples like the discussion about an antiballistic missile defence system in Europe or the NATO eastward enlargement.

The action of Quidam is set in Hadrian's Rome. Public and private hysteria rises due to the Jewish war 132-135 p. Chr., but also to a conflict between Hadrian's religion policy and its Greek, Jewish and Christian opponents. The Jewish uprising is confronted to Greek non opposition and to the Christian way of opposition by public faith witnesses. It is raised to the role of a ‘motor’ in a ruined epic machine, and hints to modern Polish (or other nations') uprisings. Barchob (Bar-Kokhba?) is shown as a Roman Jew's disciple, secret admirer of Christian courage, friend of Alexander, the poem's main person; as a messianic fighter in Judea; and finally as an advocate of interreligious solidarity. “Quidam” is a “przypowieść”, a “para-novel” with a ruined narrative time structure, and a “parable” which answers strangely to Chateaubriand's demand for Christianity epics, forming an allegory also of modern civilisation, police state, public opinion, modern conflictual cultural and religious pluralism, modern individualism, scepticism and altruism.

The article is devoted to the reception of Nikolai Ostrovskii's sots-realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered. It confronts the official intention of social control with anti-disciplinary mechanisms of reception (Certeau). Focussing on the secularized model of Christ-like self-humiliation (Phil 2,7) as represented by the protagonist Pavka Korchagin, the author attempts to show that in the actual reception of Ostrovskii's novel the seemingly dysfunctional Christological features of the prototypical sots-realist hero allowed the Soviet readers to identify themselves more with Pavka's particular faults and defects than with the ideology of sacrifice for the sake of a collective group which remains difficult to grasp. The tension between the officially orchestrated glorification of Korchagin as a monolithic hero and the anthropology of weakness inherent in the anti-disciplinary reception repeats the Christological paradox of inferiority and glory.