From Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, authors and readers!

Before you is another, hopefully traditional, neological issue of the journal. The theme was announced in the previous issue – information about the annual conference “Neology. Neography – 2024,” held at the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. This issue (starting from the end) features a review of the collection of articles prepared by the conference participants based on its outcomes. The review was written by Doctor of Philology Elena V. Osetrova from Krasnoyarsk, providing an external perspective. Thus, our journal offers the most comprehensive coverage of the conference, which explores the current state of the Russian language and is of great interest to the linguistic community.

The articles published in this issue of the journal address the topic of neology from two perspectives – lexical and grammatical.

The New in Vocabulary section features articles by professional neologists, researchers from the Institute of Linguistic Studies. The topics covered are classic themes within the field of neology. In their article, Natalia V. Kozlovskaya and Alina S. Pavlova examine a truly novel word with no known precedents – skuf – as a linguacultural type and a key word of the present moment. Despite its novelty, skuf has already integrated into the derivational system of Russian grammar. Meanwhile, Ekaterina V. Parysheva offers insightful observations on a word that, although somewhat familiar and not widely popular, has acquired a new meaning. Thus, this section demonstrates vocabulary renewal both through the emergence of new words and the enrichment of meanings of existing ones.

The Grammatical Aspects of Neology section, which consists of three articles, presents quite diverse phenomena, united by the fact that they demonstrate the action of grammar, not standing aside from the processes of vocabulary renewal. The article by Tatyana I. Steksova from Novosibirsk shows how vocabulary needs overcome interlevel boundaries, and whole sentences, which according to traditional views are not characterized as nominative units, become such. The article by Nadezhda I. Konovalova from Yekaterinburg discusses facts of the opposite nature – how morphological segments, or more precisely – prefixoids, acquire the status of a word. In my article, I would like to show that observations of suddenly popular adverbial constructions lead to the fundamental problem of analyticism in the Russian language, which, it seems, was considered in terms of vocabulary updating. Thus, the section presents three grammatical phenomena that vocabulary renewal needs include in neological techniques.

Thus, the issue offered to your attention unites university and academic linguists from Veliky Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk, expanding its geography: in addition to the North-West of Russia, it includes the Ural and Siberia.

I sincerely thank all the authors of the issue and its reviewers – Doctors of Philology Victoria G. Didkovskaya from Veliky Novgorod, Valery A. Efremov from St. Petersburg, Tatyana I. Steksova from Novosibirsk.

Until next time on the electronic pages of our journal!

T. V. Shmeleva