Le texte présente les idées générales de l'approche linguistique de Ju. Apresjan, ainsi que le contenu du numéro courant de la revue.

Le texte présente la biographie scientifique de J. Apresjan.

The paper considers the Russian construction of the form “NDAT bytʹ ne VINF”—one of several so-called “independent infinitive constructions.” This construction represents two syntactically discontinuous idioms: [X-u] ˹bytʹI.1 … ne˺11 [Y-nutʹ] ‘It is/was/will be impossible that X has done Y’ and [X-u] ˹bytʹI.1 … ne˺12 [Y-atʹ] ‘It will be impossible that X does Y’. The paper describes two illustrative sentences containing these idioms, giving and discussing their formal representations on the semantic, deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic levels; it also presents the lexical entries for both idioms with detailed linguistic comments. The problems of the “independent infinitives” in Russian and of phraseologically bound lexemes are discussed.

The paper describes an innovative lexicographic product published in Moscow in the late 1990s—
Ju. Apresjan’s New Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Synonyms [NEDRS]. NEDRS is essentially based on Apresjan’s theory of systemic lexicography and integral linguistic description. His introduction to NEDRS proposes several new important linguistic notions, such as lexicographic type, lexicographic portrait (of a lexeme), the dominant of a synonym series, etc. The main characteristic of NEDRS is the wealth and precision of the linguistic information supplied: thus, it specifies the referential and communicative status of the lexeme under consideration and its actants, the type of the speech act expressed, the capacity of constituting an independent utterance, etc.; in particular, it offers meticulous and exact analyses of semantic distinctions between synonyms. Such data were not provided before in other dictionaries. At the same time, NEDRS is extremely reader-friendly.

It has long been noted that močʹ – smočʹ ‘can, be able to, may’ is an unusual aspectual pair, yet močʹ has been commonly treated as having three meanings: alethic, deontic and epistemic. The article abandons this traditional treatment and identifies seven distinct meanings of the verb močʹ: internal ability, permissive, epistemic, warning, perceived right, permission to begin, and external possibility. Their distinctions are not only semantic but also prosodic and in their ability to have a past tense form and/or to form a perfective based on smočʹ.

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 article aims to highlight specific features that enable the identification of a certain class of Polish adverbial expressions ending in -o/-e, which do not belong (unlike regular adverbs) to the object level of language, nor represent metatext in the manner that particles or sentential adverbs do. The paper thus discusses units such as iście [królewski] ‘truly royal’, dosłownie [idiotyczny] ‘literally idiotic’, jawnie [wrogi] ‘openly hostile’, etc. Although based on linguistic data from Polish, research hypotheses are more universal. The author introduces a set of tests to ensure precision in distinguishing unqualifiable meta-predicative adverbials from those units that are superficially similar. The following parameters are taken into account: (i) prosodic features, especially the relationship of a word and the sentence (non-contrasting) stress; (ii) position in the linear word order; (iii) possibility of being negated; (iv) capacity to combine with common adverbs in coordinate constructions; (v) capacity to combine with intensifiers, weakeners, or any other predicates in subordinate constructions; (vi) relationship to the grammatical category of the degree; (vii) range of syntactic and semantic combinability; (viii) ability to be used in a context with an ordinary adverb of the same shape. An important aim of this work is the examination of (a) relationships between the epistemic character of the expressions in question, (b) their belonging to the metalevel of language, and (c) their place in the theme-rheme structure of potential utterances where they may be functioning.

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 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.

The paper explores the phenomenon of using nouns in place of verbs in performative speech acts, particularly in the context of requests. A key example is the Russian construction Našedšego ključi prosʹba vernutʹ ‘Whoever finds the keys, please return them’, lit. ‘a request to the finder to return’, which, while non-standard, is widely used in speech. The use of nouns instead of verbs in performative utterances is not unique. For instance, saying Moi pozdravlenija! ‘My congratulations!’ instead of Pozdravliaju vas ‘I congratulate you’ reflects a similar phenomenon. This tendency often arises because speakers aim to avoid the implied intimacy implied by 1st/2nd-person pronouns and verb forms, especially in formal or less intimate communication. The peculiarity of the Russian word prosʹba ‘request’ in contrast to similar words (e.g., molʹba ‘plea’) is that in performative usage it develops unique government patterns. Specifically, it governs the accusative case to indicate the addressee as a semantic argument of the word prosʹba, borrowing this pattern from the transitive verb prositʹ ‘to ask’. This reveals an unexpected connection between performativity and the syntactic behavior of the word, highlighting how performative contexts can influence grammatical structures.

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.

The article is devoted to constructions with the noun ‘moment’ (MC) in modern Russian. Our corpus study shows that Russian moment is mainly used in certain constructions. We focus on its four main types; each of them determines the semantics of the noun moment. While the word originally designated an instant, a precise moment (moment vzryva ‘moment of explosion’), it also designates a long temporal period with very vague boundaries (na dannyj moment ‘currently, at today’s time’) or loses its temporal meaning altogether in order to designate a particular aspect of the situation (ličnyj moment ‘personal moment’) which places it in the domain of argumentative vocabulary. Some of these constructions are characterized by a certain degree of fixity. The paper describes both syntactic and semantic features of each of the four models through the three centuries of evolution of the MC in modern Russian.

The article focuses on a special use of the Russian perfective past, which is virtually similar to a progressive one: it is illustrated by examples like Smotri, samolët poletel ‘Look, a plane is flying’. I show that, in fact, this use, though characteristic of a small group of motion predicates, is a part of the whole class of uses that express the partial access of the speaker to the situation (‘partial observation’): in this particular case, the speaker can only observe the middle phase of the situation, while the initial phase remains invisible. The use of perfective aspect denotes the fact that the observation period is short and represents the starting point of the observation as if it were the starting point of the situation itself. Similar phenomena are found both in the class of resultative constructions and in other construction classes: the speaker cannot observe a part of the situation and describes only the observable phase as if it was the only one. At the same time, the class of the partial observation readings is heterogeneous. First, some of them allow temporal clauses with the simultaneity meaning and other contexts, characteristic of progressive constructions, while others are incompatible with those mechanisms. Second, only some of those constructions are lexically productive, while others, like, for instance, our progressive-like constructions, characterize a small group of lexemes. I conclude that our use does not, in fact, demonstrate combinatorial properties, characteristic of progressives, thus, no nonstandard progressive past tense use is observed. The meaning of a past event is retained in the construction under analysis, and what is nonstandard is the fact that the speaker describes in the ‘online’ mode those events that have just taken place before the speech act (this use can be called ‘immediate comment’).

This paper discusses the Russian terms vokabula and leksema, as well as related concepts introduced to lexicography and semantics by a group of Moscow-based researchers led by Jurij D. Apresjan (commonly known as the Moscow Semantic School) and by Igor Mel’čuk (the author of the Meaning ⇔ Text Theory and, alongside Aleksander Zholkovsky, the primary proponent of the Explanatory-Combinatorial Dictionary). The Russian term leksema and its equivalents in other languages (Eng. lexeme, Fr. lexème, Ger. Lexem, Sp. lexema) are firmly anchored in Apresjan’s and Mel’čuk’s lexicographic theory and practice and have been widely accepted by the international lexicographic community. In contrast, the Russian term vokabula has not even been accepted by Russian lexicographers, let alone the international lexicographic community. This paper explores the reasons behind this discrepancy, which can be attributed to the nature of the lexical parallels in Russian and other languages (Eng. vocable, Fr. vocable, Ger. Vokabel, Sp. vocablo). Related issues in this paper include the widely used Russian term slovarnaja statʹja (Eng. dictionary entry, Fr. article de dictionnaire, Ger. Wörterbuchartikel, Sp. artículo lexicográfico) and the Russian term lemma (Eng. lemma, Fr. lemme, Ger. Lemma, Sp. lema), as well as the German term Stichwort (Eng. keyword), the former in the context of computational linguistics and the latter in the context of general lexicography. As a result, we propose names for Apresjan’s and Mel’čuk’s term vokabula in German (namely, Stichwort or Lemma) and English (namely, keyword or lemma).

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.

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.