Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, our authors and readers!

This issue of the journal was conceived jointly with the group of Dictionaries of New Words of the Department of Lexicography of the Modern Russian Language of the Institute for Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg), to be more precise, with Natalya Vitalievna Kozlovskaya, who was the author of this issue and encouraged her colleagues in the group to participate in it.

In some way, our issue can be considered a continuation of the conference that the group held at the end of last year and information about which was kindly provided to us by Marina Nikolaevna Priemysheva, Head of the Department. So one can start reading the issue starting from the last heading “Scientific Life: Chronicle, Overviews, Reviews”, where the information is placed. Of the many problems of neology that were discussed at the conference and are the subject of the daily labors and reflections of the staff of the group, in our issue the problems of replenishing the lexicon with special vocabulary and the influence of new vocabulary on grammar, or rather, the typology of Russian words were developed. Therefore, the general theme of the issue is formulated as follows: the new in vocabulary and grammar.

The articles of the first rubric “Terms at a Time of Discourse Migration of Vocabulary” present the results of the updating the general vocabulary at the expense of the special one, and this renewal is associated with the process of moving words from one discourse to another, which is aptly called discursive migration in the article by Natalia Vitalievna Kozlovskaya and Alina Sergeevna Pavlova. This apt expression was included in the title of the rubric. In the article by these authors, such a migration of a series of designations from the sphere of modern technologies is considered, for which the English word smart or its Russian counterpart умный is used. Having a vocabulary of 70 units and a corpus of statements with these lexemes from different sources, the authors present their semantic and spelling characteristics, demonstrate different cases of using the “smart lexicon” in various discourses over a period of more than 20 years.  Another type of terms is considered in the article by Elizaveta Sergeevna Gromenko. This is medical vocabulary, the introduction of which into the common vocabulary was greatly facilitated by the pandemic. Two articles in the rubric convince us that the processes of replenishing the lexicon are far from being monotonous, and almost every lexical unit deserves special investigation, which is what the Neography group is doing.

The second section, “Grammatical Consequences of Vocabulary Renewal,” brings together articles that show how the mass appearance of words of the same type forms new grammatical classes. One of the most noticeable phenomena in grammar was the folding of Russian nouns with the final –инг, which are discussed in detail in the article by Svetlana Dmitrievna Levina. Two other articles – by Anna Valerievna Batulina and Elena Mikhailovna Markova – are devoted to the grammatical type of words – univerbs. Although the first of them deals with neoderivatives from the position of semantics and the second with derivatology, it is obvious that the point is that the emergence of new forms as the realization of Russian grammar's own possibilities leads to the fact that derivatives form a new type of words, introducing changes in the grammatical picture of the Russian word.

In our journal's traditional column “Young Voices” we have Chinese researcher Yi Liqun, who defended her PhD in December and is now working in her home country. She publishes a note not about new words, but about the meta-language of description and study – the history of the term модное слово (buzzword), which characterizes some of the neologisms.

However, the voices of the other authors of this journal – A.S. Pavlova, co-author of the first article, and E.D. Kukshinova, author of the review, which closes the issue, also sound young. This review is thematically related to the first rubric, it shows how the Dictionaries of New Words, issued by the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, reflect the terminology of computer technology, getting a chance to migrate to the general Russian lexicon, for which the author had to carefully re-read the dictionaries for 2017-2021. So in this issue of the journal there are both authors and readers of Dictionaries of new words.

So, the new in vocabulary and grammar is presented in the articles of this issue of the journal in different ways, from different positions, which emphasizes the importance of the problem in theoretical terms. The main thing, it seems to us, is that we managed to show in a “close-up” what a fundamental task of Russian studies is being solved by the employees of the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, carefully observing in the infinite space of the media sphere the process of the emergence of new words and new meanings of known lexemes, fixing these changes in their annual dictionaries and reflecting on these phenomena in their scientific papers.

I sincerely thank everyone who responded to our plan to prepare a neological issue of the journal and sent us texts in various genres.

It is customary that I thank our reviewers, Tatiana Gennadyevna Nikitina, Doctor of Philology, Victoria Genrikhovna Didkovskaya and Valery Leonidovich Vasiliev, who constantly contribute to keeping our journal up to the standards of modern science.

Until we meet again on the electronic pages of our journal!

T. V. Shmeleva