Wiener Slawistischer Almanach - Sonderbaende – serie

The book intends to render available to a wide range of students of Slavic languages, and particularly of Ukrainian, an outline of Ukrainian dialectology. The author presents the fascinating world of geographical variation of contemporary Ukrainian to all students of Slavic languages. A basic knowledge of Ukrainian dialects is likewise important to complete the theoretical and practical background of a Slavist, especially if focusing on Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian. It is also a valuable aid to a better understanding of diachronic and synchronic language processes, e.g. the Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech «suržyk».

This collective monograph represents a selection of the contributions presented at the "1st International Symposium on Italian-Ukrainian Contrastive Studies". The thematic range of the articles includes linguistic topics (e.g. contrastive grammar, sociolinguistics, semantics and lexicology), followed by literary/cultural and translation studies.

Why did Osip Mandelstam picture himself as a victim of anti-Semitic persecution, but at the same time described his victimizers using the grotesque features of Jews from anti-Semitic mythology? What was the meaning of Sasha Chorny’s pen name? Why were the Russian translators of Gargantua and Pantagruel steadily leaving out one phrase from the novel? Why did Alexander Pushkin use the same idiom in his fragments on Cleopatra, though in different contexts and referring to different things? What was the principle used by Leo Tolstoy when choosing one of the four patterns created by a diegetic or non-diegetic narrator and a personal or narratorial point of view? Why was the common knowledge about the tight alliance of the four post-symbolist poets – Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova – so enthusiastically appreciated by Akhmatova herself? Why in Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat the robbed Akaky Akakievich receives a kick in the butt but falls face-up? Which fairy-tale character does the name of the dwarf from Vladimir Nabokov’s short story The Potato Elf allude to? Each of these questions is reviewed in a separate chapter of this book, united by a uniform interpretation method, theoretically substantiated in the book’s foreword.

The Festschrift volume consists of 42 contributions by 55 authors from 13 countries. The papers, written in Catalan, English, French, Russian and Spanish, treat data from these and some other languages (Arabic, BCS [Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian], Czech, Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan [Alaska], Shughni [Pamir]). They pertain to virtually all branches of "core" synchronic linguistics (with occasional excursions into diachrony, literary theory, philology and religious studies): semantics, lexicology / lexicography, syntax and morphology. Some are more theoretically minded while others are focused on pedagogical and / or computational applications of language models, particularly those of the Meaning-Text theory. The topics covered are collocations and other types of phrasemes, lexical functions, syntactic dependencies, argument structure and grammatical voice, to mention just a few.