This article deals with the means of expressions of 'possibilty', 'necessity' and 'volition' in Novgorodian Birch Bark Letters. The author fives an overview of the different types of expressions and compares them with the modal inventory of Modern Russian. The analysis is based on a classification of the modal means of expression which takes both semantics and formal properties into account.
The article draws attention to the actual situation of the Russian orthography. In 1980ies-1990ies the orthographic commission headed by professor V. V. Lopatin elaborated a new project of Russian orthography reform. The reform concentrated especially on correction of the "gaps" in the old orthographic system (dated back to 1956), concerned several rules of writing new expressions etc. Theses of the reform were published in 2000 (the new orthographic dictionary of Russian in 1999), but were never officially sanctioned. As a result, the old orthographic rules from 1956 are still valid for contemporary Russian.
In the article the essence of phonetic and phonematic principles is expounded and the author comes to the conclusion that the principles differ. On several examples from the history of the Proto-Slavic phonematic system their different functioning is shown.
Semantic changes observed in aphasic patients are examined in two aspects: as transfers of names and transfers of meaning. The most frequent in the material under scrutiny are semantic changes resulting form the contiguity of meanings (metonymies) and shifts motivated by the similarity of names (paronymies). Changes based on the similarity of meanings (metaphors) and the contiguity of names (ellipses) are less frequent. The relative frequencies of the mechanisms underlying semantic change in aphasia lead one to reflect on the nature of cognitive functions in aphasic patients. That the configurations of form and content, obtained by analyzing aphasic texts, are stored in people´s cognitive structures and as such constitute templates or patterns necessary for the comprehension and description of reality, as well as for the segmentation of interpreted sequences of information. The patterns recognized in the present study pertain primarily to the visible, physical world, judgments of non-material mental images are less frequent.