Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, our authors and readers!

Syntax is the topic of this issue of the journal. It so happened that the submitted articles – for all their differences – are united around two syntactic problems, which has made it possible to combine them into two columns.

The first one combines works that interpret syntactic links in the broadest and most diverse interpretation of this phenomenon. And this is not surprising, because connection is an elementary and, at the same time, fundamental concept of syntax in any version of it, and it conceals the unknown that attracts syntaxists again and again.

In the opening article of Igor Efimovich Kim from Novosibirsk, the classical concept of the syntax of communication – concord – is interpreted, it shows that this well-established (and well-studied) syntactic mechanism undergoes changes under the influence of various factors, including non-syntactic ones.

An article by Mikhail Yakovlevich Dymarsky from St. Petersburg is devoted to the interpretation of the syntactic relations of the infinitive, and it turns out that for this it is important to take the possibility of a subject position into account, which indicates the non-triviality of the syntax of this non-conjugated verb form.

In the article by Svetlana Aleksandrovna Solovieva from Cherepovets, the connections between the components of the co-ordinating series are considered on the basis of modern prose, while a stylistic device, a conflict parataxis, is revealed. This is not the first time Svetlana Aleksandrovna publishes her observations in our journal; in the last of last year’s issues there is her article on B. Pasternak’s prose, which was the subject of her doctoral thesis. Continuing her syntactic observations on modern prose, Svetlana Aleksandrovna develops an area that could be called syntactic stylistics, since she considers the actions of syntactic connection in the aspect of artistic effects.

Maria Iosifovna Konyushkevich from the Belarusian city of Grodno, who is not the first-time author of our journal, talks about the syntactic connection at the level of a complex sentence. No less than syntactic connections, she is interested in their indicators, hence the long-term work of Maria Iosifovna on prepositions and conjunctions – Russian and Belarusian. This time, her reasoning concerns the connection, which is usually called the containing. Showing its specificity at different levels, the author scrupulously examines its indicators, striving to ensure that none of them is out of syntaxists’ sight.

Paradoxically, this section ends with an article by Boris Yustinovich Norman from Minsk. As a member of the editorial board of our journal, in almost every issue I express my sincere gratitude to him for reviewing articles, which he does with interest, scrupulousness and, one might say, wit. And finally, to our joy, he appears as the author of the article. The paradox, however, lies not in the fact that the always reviewer is now the author (and the reviewer, by the way, too!), but in the content of his article. It shows that for all the development of Russian syntax, modern discursive practice requires texts in which it turns out to be “inactive” – syntactic links are not indicated, not expressed – but everything is clear. The author calls such texts agrammatic and explains this property of theirs by the discursive conditions of their functioning. In this and other works, Boris Yustinovich returns to the idea of the discursive conditionality of grammar, which seems to be very important for modern syntactic studies.

Therefore, in the first column of this issue of the journal, the syntax of connection appears in a variety, demonstrating attention to eternal syntactic plots and new approaches to linguistic material, which shows new trends in discursive practice.

The second column combines articles on the semantic types of sentences, their description and study seem to be the most important task of semantic syntax.

The article by Tatyana Ivanovna Steksova presents sentences with the semantics of controllability, which is created by the distributor of the “under control” type model. The article is based on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, which demonstrates the new syntaxists’ possibilities in forming the corpus of the studied sentences, new syntactic methods.

Having prepared an article on evaluative statements for this issue, I would like to draw attention to the fact that speech practice in different genres and, as they say, on different Internet sites provides non-trivial material for syntaxists. It would seem that the expression of a positive assessment – what new can be found here? But it turns out that such a step requires commentators to activate their syntactic means, morphological and word-formation resources, not to mention the vocabulary, which is both borrowed and metaphorically rethought.

In terms of content, this section could also include an article by Irina Valerievna Mukhacheva from Moscow State University, because it deals with sentences with the semantics of the elimination of the result. However, we place it in a special, traditional for our magazine, heading “Young voices”, in order to emphasize that the syntax is also interesting for young people, although today it is, unfortunately, not among the fashionable topics. The youth of the author of this article, if I may say so, is twofold: firstly, Irina defended her PhD thesis only last year, and secondly, this article is her syntactic debut: in her thesis she studied the predicates of the elimination of the result as a group of verbs from the standpoint of lexical semantics. Seems like a successful debut.

So, the stated topic – syntax – brought together in this issue authors who sent articles about various syntactic problems from different perspectives. The geography of the issue – Russia and Belarus, the North-West (Petersburg, Cherepovets, Veliky Novgorod) and Siberia, Moscow – seems quite revealing. Our authors are mostly university professors. The academic note, which we are trying not to lose, is “held” in this issue by Igor Efimovich Kim, representing the leadership of the Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Mikhail Yakovlevich Dymarsky, who works at the Institute of Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, their affiliation includes universities, so we will not draw boundaries here.

I sincerely thank everyone who responded and sent their articles for this issue of the journal. And no less cordially I would like to thank our reviewers – Doctors of Sciences – Boris Yustinovich Norman and Vladimir Ivanovich Zaika. We would also like to thank our readers in advance.

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

T. V. Shmeleva