This collection, the second in the series edited and published under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Slavic Languages and Literatures at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is devoted to problems of Russian, Slavic, and general linguistics. It deals with various historical stages of the Russian language as well as of other Slavic languages and dialects. Special attentions is paid to Russian semantics, both at the level of language and of speech (text). Certain relations between Slavic and non-Slavic languages are discussed. The approaches vary from the traditionally descriptive and empirical to the modern formal-theoretical and even meta-theoretical ones.
A special feature of the collection is the publication of a few versions of the notorious Zaporozhian letter to the Turkish Sultan in the originals, transliterations, and English translations, and their linguistic analysis.
The volume is a result of a joint effort by scholars from Israel, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S.A. It is intended for specialists in the fields of Russian and Slavic linguistics, general linguistics, text linguistics, language contacts and typology.