The paper considers the significance of A. N. Gvozdev’s diary and scientific writings on children’s speech for modern developmental linguistics. The author analyses the role of Gvozdev’s research in formulating ideas about the phonetic, morphological, and syntactic norms of children’s speech development. The norms that were formulated by the speech therapist N. S. Zhukova in the 1970s on the basis of Gvozdev’s book "Issues of Studying Children’s Speech" ("Conditional Standard of the Norm") are compared with the modern data obtained through the statistical analysis of questionnaires completed by parents.

The material of the research includes A. N. Gvozdev’s diary entries entitled "From first words to the first form" and the records of the ‘speech start’ of three XXIst-century children. Taking the data into account, the author attempts to compare the speech acquisition of A. N. Gvozdev’s son Zhenya that is recorded in the above-mentioned diary and is 100 years distant from us and the author’s almost daily observation of her grandchildren’s speech development. This comparison aims to identify the constants and variables of such development. The analysis confirms the idea suggested by modern scientists that studying the formation of children’s ability to think and speak is a "clue" to many mysteries of the origin and evolution of communication. The study is based on empirical observation and takes into consideration the psychological, gender, social, and philosophical sides of the issue. The paper examines the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical aspects of children’s speech. It is claimed that each child forms laws of his/her own phonetics, and that the choice of sounds in a word to convey thoughts is a certain deliberate compromise between what he/she can pronounce and how he/she can do it to be understood. Mastering the lexical aspect of speech is closely related to the problem of children’s comprehension of the changing picture of the world. Mastering grammatical categories reflects vari[1]ations in the formation of grammatical laws in children. It is concluded that each child creates his/her language model. At the same time, the communication environment requires children to adjust the created model in compliance with the norms adopted in a particular language.

The study is devoted to Russian pronouns which children use in grammatical position of a direct object. The aim of the research is to consider the distinctive features of the pronouns belonging to different semantic groups. Additionally, the paper is an effort to answer the question if the connection between the position of the object in the sentence and the semantics of the pronoun is relevant when mastering the language, i.e. to discover pronouns of what classes are more likely to be associated with the object syntactic function in children’s speech. Corpus recordings of children’s speech, namely the data from longitudinal observations of children’s speech, comprise the material of the study. The basic research method employed is the functional-semantic analysis of utterances. As a result of the performed study, it was found that direct objects denoted by pronouns in the accusative case appear in most children’s speech in the third year of life. As for the frequency of occurrence of accusative case forms in a child’s speech, pronoun classes differ from one another; this is partly caused by their semantics. There is a clear distinction between deictic pronouns and quantifiers: children use the latter (negative, indefinite, universal) more often in the object position. Four semantic characteristics are associated with the frequency of occurrence of object forms. The first one is inanimateness: inanimate pronouns and pronouns referring to inanimate referents take the object position more often than animate pronouns. The next characteristic is anaphoricity or the anaphoric nature of pronouns: pronouns referring to another word in a child’s speech are more often in the accusative case than other pronouns. The non-concreteness or lack of reference to a concrete referent which is directly observable in the communication situation also influences the frequency of occurrence: indefinite and negative pronouns turn out to be the most "objective" for children. Finally, another characteristic is generalisation, or a reference to a group of referents: the pronoun vsyo (all, everything) occupies a prominent position on the "object" scale. The influence of semantic factors is not noted when using adjective pronouns incorporated into nominal groups dependent on nouns in the accusative case and also when using non-canonical objects (the adverbs kak (how), tak (so) and subordinate complement clauses (sentential actants) with relative pronouns.

The paper aims to identify the specific features of mastering the grammatical category of gender by Russian-Yakut bilinguals of primary school age. The relevance of the study is determined by the general context of the development in the field of ontolinguistics as a fundamental science (the identification of the common mechanisms of mastering Russian as the first and a second language). In addition, the research relevance is conditioned by setting applied tasks in the field of the methodology of teaching Russian to bilinguals. The experiment performed with Russian-Yakut bilinguals of primary school age (the experimental groups), monolingual Russian preschool children, and adult bilinguals (the control groups) revealed that on the whole, the Russian-Yakut bilinguals of primary school age mastered the category of gender worse than the Russian-speaking preschoolers of three – four years old. The most difficult way to mark the category is syntactic: firstly, primary school students in Yakut (especially) and Russian classes in Yakutia make a large number of mistakes in the gender agreement between adjectives and nouns. Secondly, errors are detected in the agreement between past tense forms of verbs and nouns. Replacement of nouns with personal pronouns and agreement between nouns and possessive pronouns pose the greatest difficulties for primary school-leavers. Thus, teaching children speaking the Sakha language should be started with mastering the most ‘transparent’ ways of expressing the category of gender. These include lexical (comparison of the grammatical gender and the sex of people / animals) and morphological (marking gender in the ‘perceptually salient’ grammatical endings of nouns in the nominative case). It is also necessary to note the role of the Russian-language input (i. e. the speech of the people around, which children perceive and process): in case this input is substantial and of high quality, the category of gender is much more thoroughly mastered.

The present paper aims to comprehend the place of A. N. Gvozdev’s linguistic heritage in the studies of child speech and in theoretical linguistics. A. N. Gvozdev (1892–1959) is rightfully considered the founding father of the science of mastering the mother tongue; he is the foremost authority on the Russian child’s speech. Nevertheless, several observations made by the scientist have not been properly evaluated yet. A number of papers devoted to mastering writing remain unpublished. Another relevant task is to analyse and use the methodology developed by the scientist for performing participant longitudinal observation of a child’s speech development. The paper examines the context of the formation of scientific approaches to studying a child’s language development in linguistics and psychology in the 1920s-30s. The research provides a brief review of A. N. Gvozdev’s views on the process of speech ontogenesis. The scientist’s perspective was reflected in the diary of his son’s speech development. There is a connection between the researcher’s studies in the field of children’s speech, dialectology, and the theory of spelling. The paper also outlines the evaluations of A. N. Gvozdev’s writings provided by well-known psychologists, teachers, and linguists. Additionally, archival data and his contemporaries’ memories are presented. Moreover, the paper discusses A. N. Gvozdev’s place in the formation of the national tradition of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to mastering the first language. The practical relevance of Gvozdev’s research into the practice of diagnosing Russian-speaking children’s speech disorders and the methodology of teaching Russian as a native and a foreign language is analysed. The paper concludes that further comprehension of the heritage of national linguistics for the development of modern ontolinguistics and for the practice of teaching languages is valuable.

This linguopoetic study of D. V. Grigorovich’s short novel "The Peasant" aims to identify features specific to the author’s creative writing style and trace the connections between the text and the linguistic and stylistic traditions of Russian literature in different epochs. The research subject is all constituents of the linguopoetic fabric of the work of art under consideration. These are linguistic units, compositional elements, stylistic devices, plot-building ideas, images, and motifs. The methods include observation, cross sampling, generalisation, linguistic material classification, and establishing the content, structural, stylistic identity of different texts. These methods helped to identify and describe the techniques of creating the lyrical context in the short novel, the place of precedent images in it, the role of syntactical parallelisms and comparisons, the functions of low colloquial and dialectal inclusions, the origins and significance of the stylistic register dynamism. The approaches of modern linguistic poetics combined with certain methods of cultural linguistics (linguoculturology), psycholinguistics, and linguistic folkloristics (linguofolkloristics) enabled the author to analyse the specific features of objectifying the Russian peasantry’s customs, superstitious, and popular beliefs in the text of the short novel. Additionally, the research paper presents some psychological phenomena, the sensory field, and the recreation of the Russian people’s cultural and linguistic picture of the world. In the course of the study, the influence of Grigorovich’s artistic heritage on the literary and stylistic context of the subsequent time (i. e. the writers creating on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the writers of the Silver Age of Russian literature as well as the "Village" Prose writers of the Soviet period) was determined.

The paper focuses on the identification and description of text-building and meaning-forming (world-modelling, conceptual) metaphorical fields in V. Kaverin’s novel "The Two Captains". The metaphorical field is viewed as a hierarchical structure. The core zone is comprised of the conceptual metaphor "life/world – creativity"; the centre zone includes metaphors extending the core metaphor, in the first place, the metaphors "book of life/life – book" and "world – theatre" (read life, a page of life, the main character and others). The linguistic units which are used simultaneously in their literal and figurative meanings (history) constitute the periphery zone. The world-modelling metaphor forms a system of "figurative parallels" in the novel. Due to this, the form of a trope can vary though its stable semantic significance remains unchanged. "Figurative" parallels include cover not only tropes, but also words in their literal meaning. Owing to continuous repetitions and associative connections with metaphorical contexts, such words support and expand the sphere of influence of extended metaphors. Life as such is perceived in the novel as creative work harmonizing reality due to the expansion of the metaphor scope with the help of intertextual inclusions (The world is a theatre, people are actors and others) and as a result of the reconceptualization of the metaphors theatre, game. They change their negative connotation ("acting") to positive ("creativity"). The metaphors (book of life –) theatre and (book of life –) fairytale receive the additional meaningful connotations "realisation of a dream, fulfilment of passionate desires". Although the subject and image of the metaphors included in the metaphorical field differ, the seme ‘creativity’ enters the comparison feature of each of them.

The paper aims to describe the impact of judicial thinking on the style and imagery of L. Andreev’s prose. The research provides a theoretical interpretation of such central symbol-metaphors related to judicial issues as court, sentence, defence, and prosecution. The study draws parallels between the writer’s biography and the existential themes which L. Andreev reproduces in his writings by applying specialised terminology to metaphysical problems. To identify the above-mentioned parallels, traditional literary analysis is employed. It aims to generalise the writer’s aesthetic views on literature in the light of the judicial peculiarities of his thinking. Particular attention is directed to the influence of judicial stylistics on the poetics of L. Andreev’s writings. As a result, the application of linguostylistic analysis (aimed mainly at examining the lexical and syntactic structure of L. Andreev’s texts) enables the author of the paper to conclude that there is a sudden reorientation of the writer’s artistic strategy. L. Andreev replaced the rhetorical expressionist impact on the reader’s mind with the sharp, abrupt syntax of the story "The Seven Who Were Hanged". The form of judicial rhetoric manifestation also changed. The author substituted the deliberately monotonous stringing of "formulae-sentences" for the ornamental suggestion of the previously used techniques. The concise and compressed bare phrase became the method of conveying the author’s marked tendency that is indicative of the enormity of executions. The methods of statistical calculation and the linguostylistic analysis of excerpts from the short story "The Seven Who Were Hanged" were used to reinforce the derived conclusions. Additionally, theoretical material which helps to comprehend the specific features of courtroom prosecution speeches with regard to L. Andreev’s texts is analysed. The literary generalisations provided in the paper can be used in Russian language and literature lessons.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the latest anglicisms (English borrowings) with the meaning of person. The emergence of such lexemes in the Russian language is caused by proper linguistic reasons as well as the global changes in the political and economic life of the country in general and in the socio-cultural sphere of every person’s activity. With the onset of the 21st century in Russia, there comes a time of a new generation of young people called "millennials". They have formed original trajectories for the development of society and its mentality. The collected linguistic units are a verbal illustration of the reality at the beginning of the third millennium, i. e. the time when the examined borrowings appeared in the Russian language. The empirical data was obtained from "glossy" periodicals, namely publications in Russian printed over the last five years. Such magazines are a platform for an intensive transfer of borrowings, including numerous person-denoting nouns. The paper aims to classify the data according to the thematic principle, to characterise the collected units from the standpoint of semantics, morphology, and graphics. Finally, the purpose is to present a generalised linguo-sociological picture of the new generation of Russians – the millennial generation. To achieve the objectives, the method of continuous sampling of the empirical data was used. The gathered linguistic material was interpreted with the help of synchronic analysis taking into consideration the descriptive, classification, and contextual ways of presenting the obtained results. The performed analysis has shown that the latest person-denoting nouns mainly appear in the virtual linguistic space, in the segments of the beauty and fashion-industry, business, labour market, mass media, show business, tourism, and others. Many linguistic units name new sociocultural phenomena characterising the "millennial generation". However, excessive borrowings constitute a significant vocabulary layer. These words have native equivalents and are used in glossy magazines for stylistic marking, making texts sound more "cosmopolitan", for prestige and other purposes.

К статье Д. А. Романова (Ф. И. Ус п е н с к и й . Из актовой речи, со значительными сокращениями, произнесенной 1 мая 1890 г. в день празднования Новороссийского университета)