Purpose. The aim of the article is to describe the system of means of expressing permission in the language of documents of the 18th century. On the basis of linguistic material extracted from collections of published documents, patterns of expression of permission and their dynamics during the 18th century are revealed.

Results. In the time of Peter the Great, there was an activation of the means of expressing permission inherited from the previous era (constructions with the word volya, the predicative adverb vol'no and adjective volen), and at the same time new ways of expressing permission arose: the verbs dozvolyat'sya, pozvolyat'sya (polonisms), the phrase ne zapreshchat'sya. Later, new models remained in the Russian business language, and those inherited from the prePetrine business language mostly disappeared. Throughout the 18th century, there was a competition between the verbs dozvolyat'sya and pozvolyat'sya. In the Petrine era, the verb moch' also started to be used in documents, but its widespread use begins in the second half of the 18th century.

Conclusion. In the era of the reign of Catherine II, a new period of enrichment of the means of expressing permission began. European (most likely German) calques imet' pravo, imet' vlast', vlasten appeared in the language, of which the calque imet' pravo turned out to be particularly productive. A variety of models for expressing permission had different sources of origin and presented the idea of permission in different ways.

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to analyze the characteristics of lexical terms in Russian texts from the perspective of lexical rhetoric. So the article analyzes the peculiarities of the vocabulary and phraseology of the letters from “Letters on the Christian Life” of the famous preacher, religious teacher Bishop Theophan the Recluse.

Results. Through the analysis of the selected specific vocabulary and idioms, we have obtained the following results. One of the distinguishing features of these epistolary texts is polystylism, which manifests itself in a free combination of vocabulary of foreign origin, colloquial words, and Church Slavonicisms. If borrowed vocabulary is used in a stylistically neutral function, then colloquial elements are stylistically marked and used in order to establish communication with addressees. Such vocabulary creates a kind of trusting relationship between the addresser and addressees. Phraseological units and constructions, which are author’s, occasional transformations of phraseological elements, serve the same purpose. Church Slavonic inclusions in letters are a kind of communicative fragments, intexts within letters, conditioned in thematic (definitions of theological concepts) and genre (quotations from the Bible and prayer addresses).

Conclusion. In summary, through this research, we can derive some new theories of linguistic application, and through it, we can enrich the interpretation of corpus and dictionaries.

Purpose. Analysis of literature on Russian morphology revealed the problems related to functional potential of adjective word-forms and the morphological content of indeclinable nouns. There are three viewpoints on features of indeclinable substantives: 1) they have categories of types, numbers, and cases, while the number and case appear as homonymous forms with zero ending; 2) all categories of presented forms are used as inflection of adjectival words; 3) these substantives have no categories of number and case but have their syntactic meanings. The article's purpose is to determine functions of adjective word forms in combination with inflected and indeclinable substantives, specifying the morphological content of the indeclinable ones.

Results. Adjectives in combination with declinable nouns perform the structural function of agreement in gender, number, and case. However, when combined with two-generic words, they lose the generic agreement. Adjective inflections express the meanings of gender, number, and case in the adjective structure itself; the same-name dominant substantives only reflect these meanings, being their material indicator.

With indeclinable nouns, adjectival word forms agree only by gender, also being just an indicator of it. Indeclinable substantives have no number and case meanings. Adjective word forms with an indeclinable substantive independently express quantitative and case meanings without participation of a substantive.

Purpose. The article is devoted to the representation of the veracity appraisal – the main type of appraisal in the Internet users’ comments on the news about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The purpose of the paper is to investigate what linguistic means are used to represent this kind of appraisal and identify the dominant value in Russian society towards this matter. To reach this goal, we used continuous sampling technique to select 1 187 comments on posts about SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in social networks, where 116 language units containing veracity appraisal were found.

Results. The analysis of the material shows the domination of negative emotionally coloured language units, mostly words with axiological semantics and evaluative metaphors. The veracity appraisal is also represented by phraseological and syntactic units. In some contexts appraisal can be intensified; in particular cases appraisal type is transformed or concretized by the addition of another type to the basic one.

Conclusion. The value dominant of the Russian society regarding the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the veracity of information, proofs that can confirm the official statements, and real scientific data. The dominant attitude to the received information is distrust which leads to somewhat intense aggression.

Purpose. Often, the choice of the form of address depends on how we will develop further communication between representatives of different cultures and confessions. The rapidly developing friendly Russian-Iranian interstate relations predetermine the relevance of the research topic chosen by the authors. This study is devoted to a comparative study of addresses in the Russian and Persian languages in the communicative and pragmatic aspect. The purpose of this study is to study linguistic units that act as addresses, their connotation and translation correlation in the Russian-Persian-comparative aspect of speech etiquette. The material of the study was the most commonly used Russian and Persian units of the speech act, which were selected by the authors as a result of observing the speech of native speakers, as well as from those selected by the method of continuous sampling from leading researchers in this field in Russian-Iranian comparative linguistics.

Results. The results and novelty of this study lies in the selection of linguistic units of a speech act in the Russian-Persian comparative aspect, which is widely presented for the first time. As a result of the study, appeals were divided into two groups: regulated and non-regulated. The study of appeals in this aspect will help prevent possible misunder-standings caused by differences in the linguistic and cultural education of the Iranian and Russian society.

Purpose. Russian and foreign linguists studied the influence of Turkic languages on the grammatical and lexical composition of Mongolic languages. Material from monuments and modern living languages of Siberia shed light on the role of the early Turkic and Mongolic language in the development of the modern linguistic landscape of the region, specifying its place in the Altai linguistic family from a cultural perspective. Horse is a sacred animal for all Turkic and Mongolic speaking nomads that take an important place in their economy and culture, with all its characteristics being featured in the lexicon of the languages under comparison. Researchers also examined a wide range of Mongolian words reflecting various sex- and age-specific terms for livestock and its color as well as keeping and pasturing practices, pasture characteristics, livestock economy, etc. The lexicon characterizing horse movement in Turkic and Mongolic languages has not been the subject of comparative analysis in modern Turkic studies. Thus, the paper describes and analyzes the lexico-semantic group of words that represent the terms for the pattern of natural movement of horse in Turkic and Mongolic languages.

Results. To achieve the research objectives we used the synchronous descriptive, comparative, contrastive-typological, and where possible comparative-historical methods. The study defined the structure and semantics of linguistic units, revealing considerably more similarities than differences in the plane of expression in both Turkic languages of Siberia and Mongolic layers of vocabulary.

Conclusion. Yakut demonstrates both the Turkic and Mongolic layers, which is characteristic of all languages under comparison. Also, there are later borrowings from Buryat, e.g. the verbs denoting ‘amble’.

Purpose. The article is devoted to the analysis of death messengers, their role and meaning in Ivan Turgenev’s story “The Unfortunate One” and Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina”.

Results. In Turgenev’s story a herald of death is presented as a phantom, a soul manifestation of the young woman who subsequently dies under mysterious circumstances. At the same time, the phantom appears not to the gaze of the female character, who falls victim to family intrigues, but to her spiritual friend, Pyotr Gavrilovich. The young student perceives a strange vision as an optical illusion, but sees the next clue that is a dream, a premonition of an impending disaster. A light phantom of the young woman is both an omen of her impending death, and a kind of call for help. In “Anna Karenina”, the messenger of death appears in the form of an infernal old man and becomes a sign of the terrible death of an unfortunate woman. His horrible appearance is a reflection of the horror that Anna Karenina faces in the last minutes of her life.

Conclusion. Death messengers warn of impending danger but also let us guess the type of death awaiting the heroes by their look.

Purpose. The article discusses the connection between the landscape descriptions in the short story and its content.

Results. The landscapes, together with Delvig’s elegy and the reference to Pisemsky’s novel A Thousand Souls, partly anticipate the content of the story and give the reader an opportunity to expect beforehand that Ionych’s love for Kotik will fade, and the protagonist of the story will end on a downward slope. The contraposition of the sublime, the poetic and the prosaic everyday matters is the common theme of the whole short story Ionych. This contraposition is set up in the beginning of the story in the description of the garden. The landscape descriptions also echo the themes of the story and introduce some of them. The inscription over the cemetery gate introduces the theme of moral judgment against the protagonist.

Conclusion. The nature in the story turns out to be ambivalent: it promises “a quiet, beautiful, eternal life” and at the same time threatens with the mute desperation of nothingness. This ambivalence can be found in other works by Chekhov, too. Besides this, the cemetery landscape introduces into the story the theme of temporality of everything on earth. The landscape of the cemetery at night also has the combination of sex and death present in it. This Freudist combination can be found in the writer’s other works, too.

Purpose. The article aims to study the short stories and novellas by Mikhail Kuzmin written in a woman’s voice in order to show how the writer constructs femininity.

Results. It is established that in the few works of Kuzmin which are written in the female voice the diary form prevails, contributing to self-revelation, and in most cases, self-exposure of the heroines. According to Kuzmin, the characteristic features of the females are the tendency to consider themselves “the navel of the earth”, the inability to love unconditionally which is the only way to love truly, as well as the ineptitude of seeing true men’s nature instead of their own reflections, and the need for “romance”, agitation, extreme emotions, intensity of the atmosphere stemming from the same inability to love. The rare female characters that the narrative sympathizes with are women who have managed to overcome these failures.

Conclusion. It turns out that the hypothesis of Kuzmin’s misogyny is quite fair: indeed, in the overwhelming majority of cases, women are portrayed without any sympathy and are endowed with many unpleasant qualities. At the same time, Kuzmin does not only reproduce the traditional topoi of the masculine gender order, which considers women as inferior creatures by nature, he also finds original interpretations for them: such is, for example, one of Kuzmin’s main charges against women, i. e. their flair for drama. Although the origins of this charge lay in the stereotype of the supposedly “hysterical” women, Kuzmin presents it in an elegantly modified form.

Purpose. The study is devoted to the description of the poetic world of V. V. Nabokov-lyricist, more precisely – its color fullness on the example of purple. The method of multidimensional lexicographic description of the color aspect of Nabokov's poetic world is proposed. The presented article offers observations on the dictionary of lexical combinations with a color component, the data for which were obtained using the original software system “Hypertext Search for Companion-words in Author’s Texts”.

Results. The use of the software package makes it possible to find stable groups of lexemes in the works of a poet, “passing” from poem to poem. Tokens are adjacent to each other at some distance and usually do not show obvious connections between themselves. These are lexical combinations. They mark common language, general poetic and individual author associations that arise unconsciously in authors. Some of purple’s satellites are obviously attracted by the sound. Purple partners organize the space, emphasizing the top of the vertical and outlining the horizontal landscape; indicate the time; note the presence of plants and humans, mark mystical (religious) consciousness. The properties and characteristics of objects and phenomena associated with purple are due to the play of light. A positive emotional state associated with purple is obvious.

Conclusion. In his “purple” lexical combinations Nabokov follows the golden age of Russian poetry, describing the celestial sphere or characterizing the earth's surface, but radically diverges, transferring this color association to the plant world, the mystical region and man. The proximity of purple to God or Russian, as well as to the characteristics of a cheerful disposition, is Nabokov’s idiosyncrasy.

The report analyzes the anniversary collection of scientific articles “History, theory and Practice of Academic Lexicography” dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the 90th anniversary of the Lexicographic sector. The work determines the place of scentific problems in the history of linguistics, and notes the main directions of the Institute’s activities and their connection with the cultural and historical tradition of A. A. Shakhmatov, V. M. Istrin, L. V. Shcherba, etc. The article indicates priority works of St. Petersburg school of academic lexicography and their role in the formation of the tradition of Russian science of the 20th – 21st centuries, and emphasizes the relevance of modern developments of scientists in the field of historical lexicography, the creation of explanatory and dialect dictionaries. The review highlights the actualization of the theory and practice of dictionary activity for the creation of multi-volume reference sources, new card files, and typological research in the field of lexicography as an obvious advantage of the collection of articles.

The article observes the monograph of N. Kovtun “Trickster as a hero of our time. On the Material of Russian Prose of the Second Half of the 20th – 21st Century”, where the attributive signs of the trickster archetype (ambivalence, vitality, the role of a mediator, liminarity, creativity, connection with the sacral) are summarized and supplemented. Each of these characteristics is convincingly substantiated on the basis of other researchers’ works. The conceptual and semantic field of tricksterism is revealed with the help of the analysis of the main motives – the path, insecurity, duality, resourcefulness, moral ambivalence, high adaptability.

The relevance of this type and its signs as a hero of time is substantiated by both aesthetic and socio-historical grounds. Modern man is under enormous pressure, therefore the researcher indicates the crisis of the main literary trends, and concludes that the vital potential of the image of a modern rogue is the most viable.

The author has analyzed a large amount of empirical material of the 20th – 21st centuries considering characters with signs of a trickster in the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shukshin, V. Makanin, M. Tarkovsky, O. Bitov, L. Ulitskaya, T. Tolstoy. The present stage indicates the trend of trickster depersonalization. As the rhetorical figure has acquired an independent communicative subjectivity, the question about the trickster's depersonalization and transformation into the category of a concept hero arises.