Understanding by Communication

Elena Borisova graduated from Moscow State University (structural and applied linguistics) in 1977 and completed her post-graduate studies in 1977–80. She spent 20 years at the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, then gained experience in advertising. Her PhD (candidate) thesis focused on the semantics of Russian modal particles; her second (doctoral) thesis concerned the semantic models and forming fixed collocations. Since 2008, she has been a Professor at the Moscow City Teachers’ Training University, where she teaches the theory of communication, new trends in linguistics, and the language of advertising. Borisova is an author of several handbooks on Russian in use, and books and articles on semantics, pragmatics and perlocutive linguistics (language of mass-media, politics and advertising). She has been an organizer of the “Understanding by Communication” conferences since 2002.

Olga Souleimanova graduated from St. Petersburg University. Her candidate thesis (1987) dealt with semantic types of nouns and their determiners (all/whole, and the Russian ves’/tselyj); her doctoral thesis (2000) focused on semantics of Russian impersonal sentences. She is currently a Professor at the Moscow City Teachers’ Training University, where she teaches language theory and translation studies. Her research priorities focus on cognitive studies (lexical and syntactical semantics of natural language) and research techniques (linguistic experiment). She is author of Problems of Russian Syntax: Semantics of Russian Impersonal Sentences (Moscow: 1999); and co-author of Grammatical Aspects of Translation (Moscow: 2010; 2nd edition, 2011) and Stylistic Aspects of Translation (Moscow, 2011).