This article examines the pedagogical potential of the Active Dictionary of the Russian Language, edited by Ju. D. Apresjan and developed within Mel’čuk’s framework of Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicography (ECL) and Apresjan’s Active Lexicography (AL). Rather than treating the Active Dictionary solely as a reference work, the article approaches it as a methodological tool for integrating lexis and grammar in the teaching of Russian as a foreign language. Following a concise overview of the theoretical principles underpinning ECL–AL, it shows how dictionary definitions can be adapted for pedagogical purposes. Each example highlights the controlled simplification of definitions and demonstrates how they can foster paraphrastic competence and support learners in justifying lexical choices in the target language. The approach proposed here argues for a more systematic incorporation of lexicographic methodology into language instruction.

This paper deals with the Russian words for worry and anxiety. The analysis focuses on the word families of bespokoitʹ and trevoga. It is based on data from the Russian-English and English-Russian subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. These data support the hypothesis that the words in the bespokoitʹ family involve a greater degree of intellectual assessment of the situation, whereas the words in the trevoga family point to a more intense and less uniform emotional experience. At the same time, the study helped verify certain details of earlier descriptions that had been obtained without parallel corpora.

The choice of a translation equivalent in each particular case depends not only on semantics but also on the overall translation strategy and the individual preferences of the translator. Nevertheless, certain general patterns can be observed. For example, with the word bespokoitʹsja, as with the English word worry, it is important that the subject is thinking over the situation and considering that it may take a turn for the worse. In the case of trevoga, as with anxiety, a key element is that the subject lacks important knowledge about the situation and therefore does not know what can be done to prevent negative developments. The words vstrevožitʹ and vstrevožitʹsja, like the English word alarmed, are characterized by a sudden realization that something bad might happen and that some action must be taken in response.

The object of the paper is Russian multiplicative verbs, that is verbs denoting repeating homogenous acts, cf. šagat’ («to step»), maxat’ («to wave»), ikat’ («to hiccup»), etc. My goal is to specify the definition of this class of verbs and to interpretate from the semantic point of view a well known systemic ambiguity of some sentences with such a verb. The study is carried out within the frame of Moscow semantic school. The problem is that there are many verbs which denote processes consisting of repeating homogenous acts, and still such verbs are never classified as multiplicative; cf. idti («to walk»); bežat’ («to run»); kosit’ travu («to mow the grass»), etc. The point is that in the focus of the meaning of a multiplicative verb are repeating homogenous acts while in the focus of idti ‘to walk’, bežat’ ‘to run’, kosit’ travu ‘to mow the grass’, etc. is purpose of action. I also demonstrate that meaning of many multiplicative verbs contains semantic component ‘once or more than once’, and because of that in some contexts they denote not series of homogenous acts but a single act. I call such multiplicative verbs non-strict as opposed to strict multiplicatives which always denote repeating homogenous acts (cf. drožat’ «to tremble for some time»). From this point of view I discuss aspectual pairs like šagat’ – šagnut’, maxat’ – maxnut’. The semantic interpretation of the verbs under discussion allows us to reveal the direction of derivation in the pair multiplicative – semelfactive.

This paper explores how the concept of frontness is linguistically encoded in spatial constructions involving double-fronted objects, such as doors and windows, across three languages: Russian, Kazakh, and Armenian. Our analysis reveals significant cross-linguistic variation in how languages assign and interpret frontness in spatial expressions such as ‘in front of’ and ‘behind.’ Drawing on corpus data, field work with informants, and typological questionnaires, we show that the frontness of double-fronted objects such as doors and windows is not a  universal feature, as one might have expected based on their experiential characteristics. Instead, spatial encoding varies across languages and appears to form different typological systems in this regard. Russian treats both doors and windows as fronted objects but only in two constructions – ‘in front of the door’ and ‘behind the window’, both referring to exterior location; Armenian assigns frontness primarily to windows; and Kazakh partially treats windows as fronted, while doors exhibit inconsistent patterns. These findings suggest that the encoding of spatial relations involving double-fronted objects forms a typologically diverse domain.

Russian verbs capable of expressing spatial displacement (among other meanings) allow the prefix po- to express two contradictory meanings: inchoation (onset of action: ‘Let’s go!’) and delimitation (temporal bounding: ‘Enough running!’). This article explores the conditions triggering this duality, focusing on the grammatical category of so-called “verbs of motion”. Within this small set, which contrasts determinate and indeterminate verbs, the former tendentially select the inchoative meaning, while the latter select the delimitative meaning. The analysis is carried out using the example of the determinate verb (po)nesti and the indeterminate (po)nosit′, with extension to non-motion uses.

The core argument is that determinate verbs – like other motion-capable verbs – rely on an unstable term a, whereas indeterminate verbs, as products of a morphological derivation process, operate on the feature that distinguishes verbs within this category: the mechanism creating this instability. In the case of nesti/nosit′, this involves a contingently defined locator (e.g., a “carrier”). Consequently, po- prefixed to determinate verbs targets the existence of a, while with indeterminate verbs, it modifies the properties of the “carrier”. For verbs outside the determinate/indeterminate opposition, the ambiguity stems directly from the verbal base’s interpretation, generating specific semantic effects.

Regular polysemy is considered more intrinsically linked to metonymy than to metaphor in both linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. Yet, on the one hand, metonymy exhibits varying degrees of regularity, and on the other hand, metaphor is also subject to polysemic regularity. This paper aims to assess the extent to which metonymy and metaphor exhibit regularity in the lexicon. Based on the analysis of lexicographic descriptions of a sample of nearly 3,000 French nouns, this study compares the regularity of polysemy patterns—defined as recurring sense alternations—within the two types of figures. While the findings confirm theoretical assumptions by identifying more regular metonymic patterns than regular metaphoric ones, they reveal, on average, no significant difference between metonymy and metaphor in terms of regularity. The resulting dataset is publicly available to allow further exploration of how regular polysemy emerges in the lexicon and its correlation with lexical figures.

Arguments, unlike adjuncts, are typically understood as verb-specific dependents, which includes the fact that the morphosyntactic devices used for argument encoding are determined by individual verbs. Building on this observation, we operationalize arguments as dependents whose encoding device occurs with a given verb at a significantly higher-than-average frequency. We apply an argument extraction algorithm to a dataset of 132,221 verb dependents from Russian treebanks available in the Universal Dependencies (UD) platform. To evaluate the algorithm ’ s performance, we compare its results to a manually annotated subset, informed by The Active Dictionary and a detailed semantic understanding of argumenthood. The frequency-based algorithm achieves acceptable precision (approx. 0.83), with particularly few false positives, making it a promising tool for cross-
linguistic applications in typologically diverse languages with UD treebanks. Theoretically, we argue that a quantitative distributional approach to valency—originally proposed in Ju. D. Apresjan ’ s early pioneering work—broadly aligns with the in-depth semantic analyses of individual verbs and their meanings found in his later works, including The Active Dictionary.

The present paper explores the polysemy of the Polish verb tęsknić, drawing upon the systemic and systematic semantic analysis and lexicographic description designed by Ju. Apresjan. Contemporary dictionaries document two senses of tęsknić: the primary one denotes a feeling, while the second meaning is predominantly volitional rather than emotional. However, an analysis of available corpora reveals that in everyday usage, tęsknić appears to manifest semantic contents far beyond
the scope of these ‘official’ meanings.

According to a systematic approach to lexicography, it is essential to allocate equal attention to both the unification of lexical units within a particular lexicographic type and to individual properties of each unit, particularly with regard to their semantically motivated formal characteristics. As to the common properties of the lexical type, the present study draws upon a substantial corpus of crosslinguistic research in the field of feelings and emotions. The main attention is given to individuation, that is to particular semantic components and linguistically relevant properties of tęsknić, including syntactic structures of PP complements, perfective derivatives and intensifiers.
In this respect, significant differences appear in the behaviour of occurrences identified in the corpus, leading to a hypothesis of a polysemy with four rather than two meanings.

The findings of the study have resulted in the identification of four distinct meanings of tęsknić, as opposed to the two previously documented.