This article is concerned with onomatopoeic interjections that describe the visual and acoustic effects produced when a subject or object comes into contact with water or another liquid. The aim of the research was to establish the criteria for devising a typology of such onomatopoeic expressions. The research material consisted of water-related onomatopoeic interjections in Russian and Finnish. While it is well known that such words can be used as predicates in Russian, descriptions of Finnish grammar make no reference to this type of syntactic function. Since words belonging to this group are recorded and codified in Russian dictionaries, but not in Finnish ones, the authors employed different methods for each of the two languages in examining the lexical material. After establishing a codified inventory of water-related onomatopoeic interjections in Russian, the authors analysed their dictionary meanings, which enabled them to reduce the semantic content of the interjections to a set of prototypical ideas. On the basis of this analysis, the authors created a typology of water-related situations and established the criteria for identifying onomatopoeic synonymy. To compensate for the absence of dictionary data for Finnish onomatopoeic interjections, native speakers were asked to fill in electronic questionnaires in which their task was to complete descriptive utterances, to make acceptability judgements concerning the use of particular onomatopoeic expressions, and to pinpoint the essential features of the situation described. The data obtained for both languages were systematized in tabular form in accordance with the typology of water-related onomatopoeic interjections presented in this article. In contemporary Russian, the codified inventory of water-related onomatopoeic interjection consists of the following words: bultykh, bul' or bul'k, kap, nyrk (nyr'), plyukh, pshik, khlest' (khles'), khlyup, chmok, and shlep. Words used in a similar way in contemporary Finnish include the following: kohi, kuoh, liri, liti, lits, loiskis, loti, lati, lats, molskis, pirsk, plats, polskis, pori, pul(i), roiskis, and tip. It turned out that the major considerations influencing a speaker's choice of a suitable water-related onomatopoeic word include the following: (1) seriality: whether a sound (and, consequently, a word) is repeated; (2) the location at which the sound is produced, i.e. whether the object comes into contact with the surface of the liquid or with a deeper stratum; (3) the shape of the object that interacts with the liquid (flat or multidimensional); (4) the result of the interaction (whether or not complete immersion in the liquid takes place); and (5) the quality of the object's interaction with the liquid. Apart from comparisons between Finnish and Russian, this typology provides a framework for the contrastive analysis of water-related onomatopoeia in other languages as well.

The word "market" is at the core of the process of modernization in Russia, especially in regard to the economic modernization. This article analyzes the usage of the word "market" (rynok in Russian) in the metropolitan and provincial press in the Soviet Union and in Post-Soviet Russia from 1990 to 2010.

Onomatopoeic interjections (words such as the Russian bac and tjap and their English equivalents bang and pow) are not only used to imitate sounds. Russian linguistics has long acknowledged their use in predicate function instead of verb forms (for example, bac ego po lbu 'bang (interjection) him on the forehead'), but similar use is not widely reported for other languages. Instead of using the intuition of native speakers to test the possibility of this construction in different languages, we test the usefulness of a parallel corpus for such linguistic purposes. This study uses six different bilingual corpora and the multilingual Corpus of Parallel Texts of the Russian National Corpus to investigate the possibility of such uses as well as the meaning components involved and thus explicated in the translations. We conclude that predicate function seems to be a feature very characteristic of Russian, but it occurs in other languages as well. In translations from or into Russian, where Russian uses an onomatopoeic interjection in predicate function, the other language tends to use a verb, a combination of an interjection and a verb, or finds fit to explicate the deliberately ambiguous but very expressive Russian meaning in other ways.

The study analyses occurrences of Russian nouns meaning‘science’,‘religion’,‘economy’,‘politics’and‘culture’as human-like subjects. This kind of use isinterpreted as an example of a conceptualization described as PERSONIFICATION-WITH-METONYMY.On the basis of the fact that Russian examples work well intranslation into other languages, we assume that similar conceptualization ofthese abstract nouns is not completely language-dependent. The study isbased on the analysis of examples taken from Integrum, a large non-annotated Russian corpus. The large number of examples found in newspapertexts and documented both quantitatively and qualitatively suggests thatsuch non-annotated corpora can be used for studying conceptualization.