Russian Language Studies

Approaches and tools for assessing linguistic and cognitive complexity of educational texts are in demand both in science and teaching. Predicting difficulties of perception and understanding and ranking texts by classes, i.e. the number of years of learning or levels of language proficiency (A1-C2), are of particular importance for education. The study is aimed at demonstrating modern methodologies, algorithms, and tools for analyzing Russian texts in text profiler and automatic analyzer RuLingva and at presenting articles from the thematic issue on comprehensive analysis of Russian language textbooks for Russian and Belarusian schools. The research demonstrates that the modern paradigm of discourse complexology is based on the methods of stylistic statistics, which identifies functional characteristics of language units and verifies them using big data. The services on RuLingva are designed for teachers and researchers; they automatically analyze educational texts and predict their target audience based on readability, lexical diversity, abstractness, frequency, and terminological density. In “Russian as a Foreign Language” mode, RuLingva downloads lists of words from the text according to each level of language proficiency and estimates their proportion. This provides material for pre- and post-text work. RuLingva algorithm is based on the typology of educational texts and is to be supplied with tools for assessing a person’s verbal intelligence and reading literacy. The nearest prospect of RuLingva lies in widening the range of complexity predictors and installing automatic subject area discriminator. Both directions are planned to be implemented using neural networks, classification models, “typological passports” of educational texts with different complexity, and thematic orientation.

This study addresses the urgent issue of assessing the influence of lexical parameters on text complexity. The research has been conducted on the material of a specialized linguistic corpus, which includes texts of 15 modern Russian language textbooks for 5-7 grades, with a total size of 811911 words. The study is aimed at identifying the scale and dynamics of changes in vocabulary of Russian textbooks for 5-7 grades. The research algorithm included the following stages: (a) identifying the size and content of vocabulary in modern Russian textbooks for 5-7 grades, (b) assessing the share of linguistic terms in their vocabulary, and (c) identifying complexity predictors, i.e. parameters demonstrating a statistically significant correlation with readability. The analytical part of the study was preceded by a meta-description of the corpus, its tokenization, lemmatization, segmentation into fragments of approximately 1000 words. Text parameters were calculated using the text profiler RuLingva, and the correlation strength was assessed with STATISTIKA. To ensure the research results reliability, co-dependencies of lexical parameters and text readability were analyzed at two levels: at the textbook level (with average indicators for 15 textbooks for 5-7 grades) and at the level of 1000-word fragments. We revealed a slightly lower readability index, which was expected to be 1.0-1.5 levels higher. The latter may be a characteristic of Russian language textbook as a genre and indicate eclecticism of academic texts, including fragments of research discourse (rules and theory), fiction (exercises), and instructional discourse (texts of tasks). The research demonstrated that the share of linguistic terms does not exceed 2 % in the textbook vocabulary, but their share in the texts rises to 13 %. The statistical analysis indicates that the indices of ‘lexical density’, cohesion (global and local overlaps of nouns and arguments), ‘descriptiveness’ (ratio between adjectives and nouns), ‘narrativity’ (ratio between verbs and nouns), and the share of nouns in the genitive case are text complexity predictors. The prospects for the research include studying verbs and pronouns as complexity predictors in Russian language textbooks.

Implemented within text analytics as one of the strategic directions of modern Russian linguistics, the research focuses on the linguistic profiling of educational and artistic texts. The identified genre features contribute to software systems development and big language data processing. The study is aimed at revealing the ranges of linguistic parameters which differentiate educational (secondary) and artistic (primary) texts. The study was based on 72 biographies from textbooks on Russian as a foreign language and 90 excerpts from adventure stories. The genres were chosen for the contrastive study for the following reasons: (1) a high degree of narrativity and actions; (2) functional differences, namely, informative function of biography and entertaining function of adventure stories. The research corpus comprised 120932 words. Two data processing tools were used in the study: (1) the linguistic parameters were calculated using RuLingva platform, (2) STATISTIKA program was used to identify statistically significant differences between the two genres. The revealed genre-specific parameters include global and local overlaps of nouns and arguments, nouns in prepositional and genitive cases, past and present verb forms. Global and local overlaps of nouns and arguments were found to contribute to high cohesion of biographies, because the nomination of each next event in the person's life in connected with the previous one. The genitive case prevails in biographies due to the use of nominative word combinations. The research perspective is seen in the typology of genres based on linguistic profiling of official and personal biographies, on the one hand, and adventure novels, on the other hand. An important aspect of further research in the studied area is the installation of meaning matrices in the RuLingva text profiler to automate text linguistic profiling.

The rigid framework for interpreting any “code of rules” significantly limits the theoretical aspects of doing research on them and requires a special explanation in relation to orthography as a section of linguistics, especially when there are several national variants of the literary language. The relevance of the study is substantiated by the urgent need for a theoretical description of the corpus of the most significant concepts of spelling used in teaching Russian in Belarus and creating a strategic plan for introducing innovations in spelling; the need to record changes in definitions determined by the transition to convergent learning; the influence of a complex of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, and the development of optional arguments for the codification of the Belarusian national version of the Russian language. The aim of the study is to determine the parameters and specifics of the theory of orthography in educational literature for teaching Russian in the Republic of Belarus. The material of the study contained the definitions and language illustrations of the main concepts of the theory of orthography (spelling, spelling rule, orthogram, spelling principle, spelling error, spelling norm, etc.) in textbooks and manuals on the Russian language for higher education institutions of the Republic of Belarus published from 2000 to 2024. The methods of parameterization and comparison, logical-linguistic and lexical-semantic analysis were used. The authors revealed that both specialized educational publications devoted only to spelling and comprehensive publications where spelling is part of the educational material lack the theoretical and meta-linguistic apparatus of either a significant part or the entire necessary base of the theory of orthography. There are different approaches to the positioning of orthographic terminology that coexist in various educational publications. This is mainly an orientation towards outdated traditions, the absence of modern concepts (such as “orthographic activity”, “orthographic picture of the language”, etc.). The theory of orthography in educational literature on the Russian language for higher educational institutions of the Republic of Belarus is based, as a rule, on the modern rules of Russian spelling, but is characterized, on the one hand, by innovative specificity, and on the other hand, by their conservative positioning in writing practice. This indicates different approaches to the formation of the orthographic linguistic personality, orthographic linguistic and metalinguistic consciousness of Belarusians studying the Russian language. The main principles of modern theory of spelling development should take into account orthographic innovations and national and cultural specificity in teaching the Russian language in higher educational institutions of the Republic of Belarus.

The lack of long-term comprehensive monitoring of English borrowings in youth discourse and sociolect makes this study relevant. Our aim is to describe the authors’ methods for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of anglicisms in the sociolect of the Russian youth. We also aim to clarify the lexicographic consolidation modes of anglicisms in the Russian literary language. The hypothesis is that anglicisms dominate other linguistic units in the youth sociolect, such as newspeak and individual word creation. However, they do not entrench in the Russian literary language. This survey is a pilot macroproject, which encompasses two microprojects. The first microproject was conducted at Volgograd State University (2017-2019) and Saratov State University (2020-2022). The experiments involved 135 respondents aged 16 to 25. The second microproject was carried out at Kazan State University in 2022-2024. There were 210 respondents aged 15 to 25. The research material included 345 online and offline questionnaires and data from lexicographic sources and corpora. A unified methodology included classification and comparative methods, sociolinguistic interviewing, and psycholinguistic introspection. We have found out the main sources of English borrowings in the youth discourse and anglicisms frequency among slangisms. The influence of social characteristics on language variants distribution has been detected. The current findings demonstrate discrepancies between the indicators of anglicisms in the questionnaires and in the Russian National Corpus. The authors’ monitoring methods can be further applied for sovereignty preservation of the Russian language system.

Teaching Russian as a foreign language is aimed at the formation of students’ communicative competence. Speech etiquette with its formulas as culture-intensive language units is one of the components of communicative competence. Therefore, teaching speech etiquette is to consider linguistic-cultural aspect. It is important to show students how the linguistic cultures of the studied and the native language interact. The aim of the study is to present a set of exercises for teaching Russian speech etiquette to Arabic-speaking schoolchildren in the linguistic-cultural aspect at the initial stage of learning Russian as a foreign language. The main methods of this study are theoretical analysis, methodological design, and scientific and methodological generalization. The study involved Lebanese schoolchildren aged 15 and older who studied Russian at the initial stage at the Open Education Center of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation in the Lebanese Republic (Anab) in 2024. In the study, the features of the linguistic-cultural aspect were revealed, such as elements of cultural and etymological commentary, comparison of linguistic and extra-linguistic realities of the native and studied languages, correlation of etiquette formulas in Russian and native languages. The scientific novelty of the article is the proposed system of exercises considering dialogue etiquette phases (greeting, gratitude, address and saying good-bye) and the linguistic-cultural features of these formulas in Russian and Arabic. The linguistic-cultural aspect of etiquette formulas at the first stage of language learning is an important motivating factor.