Mutando mutanda: Notes on Anomalies

The article analyzes some examples of ancient Slavic (Old Russian and Old Bulgarian) writing which in the scholarly literature are considered as unique exceptions or early innovations: the reduplication of pronoun tъ and the vocative form of the subject in the Tale of Bygone Years, the use of the verb techi (teshhi) ‘run’ in a causative meaning, the use of the accusative of time in an Old Bulgarian inscription, the *o-stem nominative plural form of the *ā-stem noun ubiitsa in an Old Russian inscription of the 12th century. Attention to a wider range of sources and to the written tradition to which these texts belong reveals that the alleged anomalous forms either represent regular formations or demonstrate a distortion of the text.

Incoherence as a Feature of a Poetic Text (On the Interpretation of the Figurative System of O. Mandelstam)

As our analysis has shown, one of the dominant features of O. Mandelstamʼs poetics is the orientation towards darkening incoherence. In the article, the types and sources of his incoherences are revealed; from the perspective of constructed typology, the article explain a number of dark places in the poetʼs texts. The main method of implementing the mentioned orientation should be considered a metaphor, which Mandelstam called heraclitic. The latter, judging by the context, is a verbal image that is essentially, up to the point of hermetical closedness darkened by the use of a number of special means; this complex technique turns the text into an enigma designed to appeal to the reader's heuristic abilities.

Language Antinomies Concerning Spelling of Short Forms of Verbal Adjectives with н or нн

According to the Russian orthography, the spelling of short forms of verbal words in -нный with н (n) or with нн (nn) before a non-zero ending depends on the grammatical status of the word: participle or adjective. It is believed that writing expresses a systemic opposition of grammatical categories, i.e. the reflective vector of the antinomy “reflective – conditional” operates in this area. But is it possible to check whether the antinomy was chosen correctly to describe a particular picture of the studied area of writing? Are there any distinctive features of the types of spellings obtained as a result of the action of one or another antinomy? We attempt to answer the latter using the example of the spelling of short verbal adjectives. Proceeding from the fact that short forms of participles are always written with only one letter н, and short forms of adjectives with a non-zero ending are threefold: either with нн, or with н, or both with н and with нн, depending on the meaning and / or model management, — we will evaluate the quantitative ratio of these groups, how they are recorded in different dictionaries, compare the codification and the usual norm, as reflected in the texts of the RNC resources and Google books, we will determine what is being implemented in writing steadily and what is not. Based on the results obtained, one can try to understand whether the letter regularly reflects precisely the grammatical opposition.