To the Question of Neuter Gender Toponyms’ Declention Ending on -ovo/-evo, -ino/-yno

The present paper deals with the issue concerning neuter gender toponyms’ declension ending on -ovo/-evo, -ino/-yno in Russian language. Until the 20th century, these place names had been changed in cases steadily; in the middle of the century, a tendency outlined not to decline these toponyms despite the valid rule. The researchers highlight three reasons for distribution of this phenomenon: the professional speech of military men and topographers, the influence of non-Slavic indeclinable neuter gender toponyms, the attempt to eliminate the possible confusion of neuter and masculine nouns that have the same basis. The author estimates the reliability of the reasons that toponyms on -ovo/-evo, -ino/-yno appeared in indeclinable form, determines the possibility of these reasons to influence on deviation from the normative practice and makes an independent research based on available material. The main factor that strongly fastened in practice the non-declension of toponyms on -ovo/-evo, -ino/-yno is the society in which Russian language functioned for the most of 20th century. That was the totalitarian period with its cult of a simple man and orientation on the least educated; this circumstance could not but play in favour for distribution of multiple deviations from the literary norm. In addition, the appearance of numerous toponyms on -ovo/-evo, -ino/-yno formed from the surnames of the communist chiefs (Stalino, Lenino, Kalinino, Ulyanovo, Kuybyshevo, etc.), in indirect cases, created a dangerous analogy with the Soviet leaders, which could contribute in expansion of non-declension.

PUBLICATION OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AGRARIAN ECONOMY AND FISHERIES IN ANCIENT SOCIETIES OF “BARBARIAN” EUROPE: MID-XIX CENTURY. – 1950 S.

The authors presented an article on the publication of printed matter covering the history of agricultural economy and trades in Central, Northern, Northwestern, and Southwestern Europe in antiquity. The report is based on editions of Russian-language literature published in Russia in the mid-19th century - the 1950s.

Analysis of the Full-Size Russian Corpus of Internet Drug Reviews with Complex NER Labeling Using Deep Learning Neural Networks and Language Models

The paper presents the full-size Russian corpus of Internet users’ reviews on medicines with complex named entity recognition (NER) labeling of pharmaceutically relevant entities. We evaluate the accuracy levels reached on this corpus by a set of advanced deep learning neural networks for extracting mentions of these entities. The corpus markup includes mentions of the following entities: medication (33,005 mentions), adverse drug reaction (1778), disease (17,403), and note (4490). Two of them—medication and disease—include a set of attributes. A part of the corpus has a coreference annotation with 1560 coreference chains in 300 documents. A multi-label model based on a language model and a set of features has been developed for recognizing entities of the presented corpus. We analyze how the choice of different model components affects the entity recognition accuracy. Those components include methods for vector representation of words, types of language models pre-trained for the Russian language, ways of text normalization, and other pre-processing methods. The sufficient size of our corpus allows us to study the effects of particularities of annotation and entity balancing. We compare our corpus to existing ones by the occurrences of entities of different types and show that balancing the corpus by the number of texts with and without adverse drug event (ADR) mentions improves the ADR recognition accuracy with no notable decline in the accuracy of detecting entities of other types. As a result, the state of the art for the pharmacological entity extraction task for the Russian language is established on a full-size labeled corpus. For the ADR entity type, the accuracy achieved is 61.1% by the F1-exact metric, which is on par with the accuracy level for other language corpora with similar characteristics and ADR representativeness. The accuracy of the coreference relation extraction evaluated on our corpus is 71%, which is higher than the results achieved on the other Russian-language corpora.

Aesthetic perception of the Russian sound speech by Germans (a case study of German internet forums)

The article is devoted to the aesthtic assessment of the sound of Russian speech as reflected in German Internet forums. Segmental and suprasegmental features of Russian pronunciation which evoke in native speakers of German empathy and / or antipathy towards Russian sounding speech, are described. The ordinary Germans' naive assessment of Russian souding speech differs from that by professional linguists. Germans who are not familiar with the theoretical basis of the phonetic structure of the Russian language pay attention, first of all, to those pronunciation features that are not characteristic of the phonetic basis of the German language. Among them on segmental level are the following: trembling sonant [r̥], vowel [ᵻ] and back-lingual slit [ɣ] after vowels [e], [i] and consonants [lʲ], [nʲ], [j], the pronunciation of which in German in this position is pronounced as ich-Laut [ç]. The Germans also seem to dislike clusters of consonants that are absent in the German language, for example, -рск-, -здр- etc. The presence of these sounds in the Russian language allows ordinary Germans to characterize Russian sounding speech as rude, despite the remarks of the Germans that there are many “soft” sounds i.e. palatalized consonants in the Russian language. The main difference at the suprasegmental level, which in the scientific literature is designated as the opposition of the German “staccato” and Russian “legato”, finds its confirmation in the statements of German members of the forum. The rhythmic organization of Russian speech is assessed by common Germans as discordant and indistinct, since, unlike German speech, Russian speech is characterized by relaxed articulation, non-forced vocalization, an extended melodic range and an irregular rhythmic patterns. In addition, the use of different pitch movements in friendly and aggressive communication encourages Germans to qualify the speech of Russian speakers in obvious situations of friendly communication as confrontational.

Secondary Somatic Nominations in Media Texts Covering Economy, Business and Politics Spheres

The article set out to reveal the specific features of secondary somatic nominations in media texts in the spheres of economy, business, and politics. The significance of the problem under study is implied by a need for elucidating the evolution of language consciousness by shedding light on how corporeal lexis in the Russian language is involved in verbalization of reality in the spheres in question. The study demonstrated that secondary somatic nominations evolve due to transformation of the meaning of a linguistic unit, whose primary meaning is associated with various aspects of the human body existence. This transformation of the meaning seems to be a common way of denotating reality in the texts under investigation. We specified the sources of somatic expansion, whose semantic content is most frequently redefined in the thematic fields in question. We also identified the denotation areas (conceptual fields) where corporeal lexis is used in their secondary meanings. Our research demonstrated considerable pragmatic potential of the texts including somatic linguistic units. We established that their evaluative content results from axiological connotations associated with various corporeal concepts in the Russian linguoculture. Their expressiveness is achieved due to imagery created by unusual contextualization of somatic linguistic units. The results of the current study made it possible to establish the ways of transforming the meanings of somatic linguistic units in the investigated spheres in the Russian language. Transformation of the meanings of somatic lexis occurs by using metaphors, metonymy, similes, irony, epithets, oxymoron, gradation, language game, etc.