About Some Content-Centric Trends in Modern Russian Linguistics

The article discusses the trends of modern Russian linguistics, which are characterized by content-centrism, i.e. the tendency to study the content aspects of linguistic and speech units and (usually) pay less attention to the formal aspect. The most relevant signs for these areas include: transferring attention from the system language to the outside; active interaction with cultural studies and conceptology, personology, and literary criticism. From this point of view, the article considers: 1) the study of concepts (and their individual components: conno-tative, customary, potential, associative); 2) the study of speech genres (although Bakhtin understood speech genres as standard forms of utterance, today these studies are more inclined to content-centrism and descriptiveness, actively attract role-playing scenes as material, and emphasize a lot of attention to describing individual meanings); 3) the study of Internet communication; 4) the study of linguistic creativity and language games of various types; 5) the study of indirect communication as a whole (the general definition of indirect communication is of a clear content-centered orientation (meaningfully complicated communication in which the understanding of the utterance includes meanings not contained in the utterance itself and requires additional interpretative efforts by the addressee); classification of the indirect communication, where the main types are distinguished on the basis of content-centered orientation; 6) personological study of a linguistic personality, portrayal of linguistic personality. Comparing these directions, we find a number of common important methodological properties: 1) the absence or disproportionately small proportion of linguistic analysis of a specific material - language and speech units, preceding the conclusions of a more general nature, mainly deductive in nature; 2) the essential typological openness of the material distributed among the analyzed areas, the possibility (and sometimes mandatoriness) to supplement the list of even basic contrasts (such as, for example, phatic and informative speech genres; value-based, conceptual, figuratively-oriented concepts, etc.), while the nature of these contrasts is not rigid; 3) the material used is characterized by creative-centrism, and as a result, unit-centrism, the desire of researchers to actively attract the most striking, and therefore rare and even single examples. As a result, analysis in many cases has a certain degree of subjectivity, which brings linguistic analysis closer to literary analysis.

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