Covid‑19 is highly relevant in 2020; among other things, it is attracting new global socio-communicative and linguistic research. Scholars are addressing the linguistic response to the social and psychological situation in different countries in the era of coronavirus. Thus, the Editorial Board has created a forum for specialists to communicate (in writing), one which makes it possible to provide information about their sources on Covid‑19 and illustrate theoretical materials. The participants chose to analyse different aspects of language during the pandemic; medical terminology and its relevant vocabulary were the same for all countries. The conversation goes beyond the scope of linguistics, as it is important for the researchers to characterise measures taken by governments to combat Covid‑19 and the public’s reaction to them as reflected through language. Additionally, the authors focus on spontaneous linguistic responses to the pandemic in the form of language games, metaphors, and references to historical memory of combatting disasters. The pandemic has also caused long-standing forms of speech communication to change. Researchers from different European countries have took part: Arto Mustajoki (University of Helsinki, Finland; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia), Nadezjda Zorikhina Nilsson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Rafael Guzmán Tirado (University of Granada, Spain), Anna Tous-Rovirosa and Daria Dergacheva (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain). The conversation was moderated by Irina Vepreva and Tatiana Itskovich (Ural Federal University Yekaterinburg, Russia).

Nadezhda Zorikhina Nilsson: The Imperfective in Sequences of Events. On Nontrivial Aspectual Contexts in Russian in the PastThis article analyses a nontrivial use of the Russian imperfective aspect in sequences of events in the past. The use of this so-called "contextually-conditioned imperfective past" (Dickey 2000) is characteristic of West Slavic languages, particularly Czech and Slovak, but in the linguistic literature several cases of its use in Modern Russian have also been identified.Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, this article presents the first investigation of the range of use of this phenomenon in Modern Russian.The article claims that, in spite of the extreme rarity of the imperfective aspect in the contexts under analysis, evidence for it may be found not only in stylistically marked contexts, but in common narrative style as well.Two types of contexts are investigated in detail: a chain of events consisting of more than two verbs, and the coordinative structure, where the second verb is an imperfective one. In the first case, the occurrence of the imperfective verb can be partly explained by the communicative inappropriateness of the perfective delimitative in these contexts, and in the second case the imperfective aspect may occur due to the lack of a sharp boundary between the two actions.

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