Modern Methods and Techniques of Linguistic Studies

The article is devoted to the modern methods and techniques of linguistic studies. The attention has been paid to the paradigms that were dominant in the 20^th century – human-centrism, semantics-centrism and form-centrism; at the active development of new  branches of linguistics – linguostylistics, psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguoculturology, linguofolkloristics, cognitive linguistics, gender linguistics, interlinguistics, medialinguistics and others. All that caused the necessity to review the approaches to the methods of linguistic researches. Such key notions as methodology, method, and procedure were specified. A method is interpreted as a system of rules and principles of approaches to the studies of certain phenomena of nature, society and thinking, as a way of organizing a theoretical and practical acquisition of the reality; a methodology is understood as a totality of interconnected ways and rules of the conducting a certain research, an action algorithm of a scholar. It has been suggested to point out four levels of scientific methods: 1) general philosophical methods; 2) general scientific methods; 3) specific scientific methods; and 4) methods of separate branches of certain sciences. Traditional general philosophical methods, general scientific and specific scientific methods as well as their topicality for the modern studies have been considered. A special attention has been paid to modern methods and principles of language units’ analysis that scholars apply in new branches of linguistics. On the basis of studies that were conducted in the fields of linguostylistics, linguofolkloristics, and medialinguistics it has been shown that the topicality and complexity of the theme of a linguistic study, realization of the set purpose and tasks of scientific research require the application of relevant methods and search for an adequate methodology that could lead a scholar to desirable results. It has been found out that a modern subject and object of an analysis within the frames of new linguistic studies that appeared at the intersections of several scientific branches can be thoroughly investigated only with the application of a complex of traditional and modern methods, as well as original authors’ techniques.